One of the great perks that comes with singing with the London Symphony Chorus is the opportunity to travel widely, both within the UK and around the world. Over the years the choir has travelled extensively (from Cardiff to Kuala Lumpur, from Newbury to New York) and sung in a variety of stunning and not-so-stunning venues. I remember singing Britten’s War Requiem in the open air in Athens, for example, and singing the first choral concert in the concert hall in Kuala Lumpur’s new Petronas Towers. I also remember singing in Italy in a “converted” sports hall where you could still see the lines of the basketball courts on the floor.

In September 2001 I joined the choir in a modest trip (out one day, back the next) to Ghent in Belgium, where we were due to sing Verdi’s Requiem as part of the Flanders Festival. On the afternoon of 11th September we gathered in the city’s majestic Gothic Cathedral to rehearse with the orchestra and soloists ahead of the evening’s concert.

Verdi’s Requiem is a piece we have often sung and which never loses its depth and grandeur, perhaps because we have been so well trained over the years (by our good friend Sir Colin Davis) to be fully aware of piece’s invocation of death and – worse still – of the fear of death. It is a piece that never fails to move me.

Our rehearsal started well enough as far as I remember. The memory that stands out most begins with the moment when I began to be aware of an unusual level of extra-curricular activity amongst members of the orchestra, who were handing round mobile phones, sharing I-knew-not-what information. By the time we reached our mid-rehearsal break we were all aware that something was happening in the world beyond the cathedrals walls.

I remember the buzz and rumour that broke out as we left the cathedral in search of drinks – and of television screens. I remember watching live images of smoke pouring out from the upper floors of New York’s Twin Towers. It was hard to believe that this was real and not some futuristic horror film.

With the benefit of hindsight, I wonder how these images affected the many Westerners who viewed them and how this compares with the impact of images of disasters from many other parts of the world, especially of what we have come to know as the “third world”. For surely the impact of these images lay, in part, in the way we recognised the Twin Towers as a symbol of our Western lives. These questions were not in my mind at the time, however, as we watched the events unfolding in mute disbelief.

I’d like to say that I vividly remember the concert with the music’s powerful invocation of death. The truth is that my memories are overlaid with the impenetrable veneer of the shock and disbelief we were all experiencing on that evening of 11th September, 2001.

This was the day that became known as 9/11.

Now, it’s not that we’re totally averse to new music in the London Symphony Chorus. Still, mention a composer many of us don’t know and a piece of music we’ve barely even heard of and we can be a little cautious.

Indeed, oftentimes, there’s a familiar pattern to our approach – we start by anticipating the worst, we wrestle with the music in our early rehearsals, finding it hard we declare the music to be absolute rubbish, until finally we put a (more or less) successful performance ‘in the bag’ and suddenly we’re converted.

So, on Wednesday evening, members of the London Symphony Chorus arrived for their first rehearsal of Schnittke’s Nagasaki with a familiar wariness. Half way through our first rehearsal we are already saying the music is not as bad as we had expected. By the end of our second rehearsal we are defying our usual pattern and engaging fully with the music’s haunting sounds and vital rhythms – not to mention the Russian text.

The BBC proms site (at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2009/whatson/2408.shtml#prom52) describes Schnittke’s early, Orff-influenced oratorio, an agonised expression of solidarity with the victims of the second atomic bomb, dropped on the city of Nagasaki the day before Japan’s surrender.

Heavily criticised by the Soviet Composers’ Union, it only received its 1959 broadcast premiere (on Moscow World Service Radio) after Shostakovich’s recommendation, and was not publicly performed until 2006.

As we prepare to perform this piece, I feel privileged to be able to join the Chorus for its belated UK premiere.

Do come and join us.

Sometimes, after a concert, I take a little time before going to bed – to read, to catch the day’s news, above all, to settle. On Thursday I was both tired and elated after the evening’s performance (not to mention a little bemused by the woman on the bus who told me – and our fellow passengers – that I have “the most enormous arse” when I sat next to her and caused her to have to sit up and confine herself to just one seat). I went straight to bed.

This is not to say I did not savour the evening’s music. The Chorus had a minor role to play so that, whilst waiting to sing, we got to savour the rich textures of Debussy and Ravel and to marvel at the young pianist, Yuja Wang, as she played Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G with both great precision and a kind of daring and abandon. Our own rendition when it came – of Villa Lobos’ Choros No 10 – matched her daring and abandon, though perhaps not her precision.

Waking on Friday morning to the news of Michael Jackson’s death, my pleasure in the evening’s concert was replaced by a sense of shock – the disbelief that often comes with the news, whether expected or not, that someone has died. Putting my shock aside I got on with my schedule of appointments and, in turn, with the weekend’s activities.

Today I have time to pause. The newspapers are full of reflections on Jackson’s universal appeal – his genius, even – as a musician as well as on so many signs that his life as a child-star-become-adult-celebrity was neither easy nor healthy. I have little to say that has not been – will not be – said in the coming days and weeks. Still, I want to honour a man whose music has had such a profound impact on generations of people and all around the world. As I write, I play Jackson’s joyful rendition of Don’t Stop ‘Til You get Enough on YouTube. The music, the dance, the sheer joie de vivre – as one critic put it, his jouissance: this is what Jackson gave us.

May he rest in peace.

London has been sparkling in the sunshine. As I walked down Bishopsgate yesterday I was struck by the deep blue of the late afternoon sky. Beneath it, the buildings had a fresh appeal. It was like looking at an old friend or lover and seeing beauty you had never noticed before or long since forgotten.

Tower 42, the old NatWest Tower, sometimes looks a little weary to me. Not yesterday. The glass was gleaming in the sunshine. Its windows, and the windows of the buildings around it, reflected both the City’s traditional architecture and the cranes at work creating a new generation of buildings. A living art work.

Michael Tilson Thomas (aka MTT) was also sparkling yesterday. Reflecting on our rehearsal as I walked away, I wondered if he’d noticed that the sopranos were lost – almost to a woman – early in the evening’s last run-through of Villa Lobos’ Chorus Number 10. Still adjusting to the speed at which he took this piece, we were struggling to watch him whilst also following the music. If he did notice, he handled it with consummate grace, recognising the challenge of staying on track and urging us to prioritise maintaining the rhythm of the music over a perfect and precise rendition of the notes.

As I write, I think of my coaching clients. Isn’t that a great analogy for life? For what is it to sing each perfect note of life in tune, if in the end our life has lost its rhythm?

Today I sang at the memorial service of Richard Hickox, who was Music Director of the London Symphony Chorus when I joined in 1986 and who died in November last year. It was a beautiful service which is probably still echoing around St. Paul’s Cathedral as I write.

And though I have the opportunity to write about this service, I notice that – at least for now – my need is to be still and present to all the emotions that are with me at this time. Sometimes, it’s important to be truly present to the experience rather than to ‘observe’ it through the act of writing.

As one of my former LSC colleagues said to me after the service “I’m all mashed up and turned inside out”.

Months after Sarah Illingworth first mentoned to me, in passing, something she called Freecycle, I took a moment this morning to investigate.

Freecycle is a global recycling project, which aims to provide the means for people to find new homes for objects which are still useful – but not to them. Of course, it also provides objects to people to whom they are useful. As its name suggests, the primary rule is that the objects are available for free.

I take just a few minutes to sign up and, using the format provided to create clear postings, to make six ‘offers’ – from some rather neglected houseplants to the video player which still works and which I no longer use. I don’t know if these objects will find homes, though I do hope they will.

It’s amazing what we get from belonging to communities of various kinds. Sarah’s passing comment came to me as we enjoyed our shared community: the London Symphony Chorus. As I write, I wonder what new relationship I will develop with the community in which I live as a result of joining Freecycle.