A Child of the Snows: Between the beginning of the end and the end

I have allowed myself two indulgences on this project in the past week:

The first was to purchase a new laptop, a ThinkPad Z60t. I say new, it was reconditioned because the things are about £1500 off the shelf and tend only to go to business users. But besides being durable and having the genius little red tracking button (like a second track pad, but better), it has the most important feature of being able to run Sibelius and associated peripherals without breaking sweat. It's also a widescreen dimension monitor which suits Panorama view very well. What this means practically is that I can now write wherever I have space to sit down, and can also take my work to the piano instead of having to make trips back and forth to try things out.  Another advantage is the ability to flip open the screen and demonstrate or edit my work for another party at an instant, without having to hope their version of Sib is compatible or create a pdf on a pen drive. Admittedly working on the laptop is slightly slower due to the lack of a numeric keypad and mouse, but it's still going to speed things up overall.

The second is that's I've started on the vocal score's piano reduction. The main reasons for this are that the cantata is so close to completion anyway that I might as well do it as a form of proofreading, a phone call from the director to check on progress impressed on me that the vocal score was more urgent than the full score (still a month before the deadline though) and shoudl time get very short the remaining instrumental passages can be written as piano score and copied out into orchestration later. Despite the relative complexity of the score (there are some places where every string line has a different rhythm, although others are as simple as held chords) progress seems to be very quick, indeed in less than three hours today (an average evening's work) I have done over 100 bars, one sixth of the piece.  This too is being done in Sibelius, based on some earlier sketches and hand-written 'tryouts' to allow copy-pasting of lines into the piano staves, then each section tested and revised at the piano.

All that remains to write now is to link up the fragments of oboe solo, three small linking passages between sections and to decide how the piece ends.  The overture is done and refined, the link between verses 1 and 2 is finally sorted (I think) and so is the climax of the piece.  As things stand the piece is now 622 bars and 25 minutes long - perhaps another 20 bars left to write?