Busy day

sat april 4 2009 11:39

I'm at St. Paul's United Church in Perth now, and we are just finishing up our morning's rehearsal. Getting ready for this Brahms Requiem has been a real pleasure: conductor Brad Mills and his wife Sue Upham are great hosts, and have a beautiful, peaceful home just outside of Perth. I was last here to sing Mendelssohn's Elijah five years ago, and it was very nice to be invited back.

The rehearsal went well; only part of the orchestra was there for this first rehearsal but the choir was very well prepared and so the lack of all the orchestral voices didn't seem to bother them at all.

The jet lag wasn't too bad, so I felt ok to sing. Friday morning I got up early and went swimming at the Perth Aquatic Centre. It's very clean and bright, and there were few people at the pool, so I managed two kilometres instead of my usual one. Then I headed off to see my grandmother near Kingston and spent the rest of the morning visiting with her.

The afternoon was taken up with some shopping; certain toiletry articles (like razor blades for example) are much cheaper here in Canada than at home, while others (Speed Stick) have remained impossible for me to find in Europe, so I stocked up. I also picked up some things for dinner, and headed up to visit with Shelley and Evelyn, our friends in Balderson just north of Perth.

That visit was eventful as always, and it was great to resume our relationship as if no time had gone by. I still made it a fairly early night though, and was up at 7 to start warming up for today's 9am rehearsal. It's hard to get the voice moving that early in the day. I'm writing this blog entry in the vestry... the full orchestra and choir are here, and the sound is really quite amazing! They have worked very hard to get ready for this, and Brahms' music is tremendous, so it will undoubtedly be a good show.

Now the morning's work is done and I'm off to Renfrew to audition with the Ottawa Valley Music Festival director with a variety of musical offerings including Handel (Messiah) and music theatre ("Younger Than Springtime" from South Pacific). The day won't be over then, however. I have a solemn duty to go to Verona, Ontario, to attend the memorial service for Inie Platenius, a colleague of Maggie's, a friend from our days living in Sharbot Lake, and the former artistic director of the Blue Skies Music Festival in Clarendon, Ontario. Peter, her husband, was one of my favorite professors at Queen's University, and we came to know each other better while we lived in Sharbot Lake. Inie was a wonderful person who lived life at full speed, and I must really go and pay our respects.

After that I think it will make sense to get back down to Belleville to greet Maggie and the boys, just arrived from Belgium... in fact their plane should be landing very shortly in Toronto.