Cathedral Church of St. James

Today is an off day, and so I'm relaxing and charging up the batteries for the next week or so. I've had two rehearsals with Andrew Ager for tomorrow's concert, and we are in good shape for "The French Connection", our concert of French and Belgian music. The Cathedral is a great venue for singing, and while much of our shared music will be performed with Andrew on the piano, he will also accompany me on the organ, as well as presenting a very exciting Widor symphony.

Andrew is quite talented at creating the effect of an orchestra with the four-manual instrument at St. James, and I'm looking forward to presenting with him an opera aria by André Modeste Grétry, a famous 18th-century Liégois, celebrated in his time as "the Belgian Mozart". It should be quite dramatic!


At the same time I'm getting ready for the Broadway review show next weekend at the Living Arts Centre... that's going to be a completely different type of show, something that I don't do much of these days, but since it's "golden age" broadway, it's real singing. Then there's the St. John Passion to coach, and other projects to prepare for; I have another audition at the ZBF agency in Cologne in later March, and I need to keep my audition arias in shape, not to mention practicing my spoken German if I want to demonstrate that I speak it, if only a little (they are sticky about that thing in Germany houses).

Speaking of auditions, I have had another frustrating failure of technology: I had an audition date set for me here in Toronto, but for some reason the emails never made it through to me, perhaps because of some sort of security issue with Sympatico, and so I never showed up for my scheduled audition! GAAAH!

The director suspected there was a problem, so she called me to make other arrangements, and asked me to send them some recordings, but it's really too bad, since each time I miss one of these messages, it delays the whole auditioning (and more importantly the HIRING!) process by another six months to a year I'm seriously considering trying something a little more dependable, such as jungle drums or smoke signals, or even carrier pigeon!

On that note, here's a little film that my parents sent me on the robust nature of older technologies.