Tomorrow is our first performance of Haydn's "The Creation", at the Convervatoire Royal de Bruxelles; we had our orchestra rehearsal tuesday evening, the recitatives yesterday morning, and finally our generale is tonight... Lots of rehearsing and preparation have led up to this first concert of the season, and I must say that I owe a lot to Peter Tomek in Brussels and to Don Tarnawksi in Toronto, both of whom did a lot to prepare me for this piece when I sang it with the Kingston Symphony back in May of 2012, for the first time, and then in Antwerp a few days later with Chorale Caecilia. The work we did then really does stick, and I've very grateful to have it well-prepared for this time around. The other soloists - soprano Hilde Coppé and tenor Vincent Lesage - have performed the Creation many times before, so I am in very good company. The orchestra is a dedicated one and the choir is extremely well prepared; quiet when they need to be and very powerful when the score so indicates. It's going to be a real pleasure.
The November 11th concert at St. Andrew's is also taking shape. I have already rehearsed twice with the pianist, and last week had a rehearsal also with the 'cellist, and our material should be fine. The senior choir has started preparing its pieces as well, and two Eleanor Daley anthems will be part of the programme: In Remembrance, excerpted from Daley's Requiem, and In Flanders Fields, her setting of the John McCrae poem. I was first introduced to Daley, who was born in Parry Sound and studied at Queen's, by my friend John McFarlane, and it's really nice to have her two Canadian pieces in the programme, as well as our Oskar Morawetz setting of Grenadier, which Dina and I performed in Canada this spring.
Apart from rehearsing and planning ahead for the coming season, I have also been taking my weekly piano lesson, and am enjoying those very much. I find it most convenient to ride my bicycle to the Academie, even though there is a very large and challenging hill to climb to get there, but there are some visual rewards that come with the trip. Here we see a flock of sheep that are grazing on some land just down the street from the Academie; this parcel of land is also used for garden allotments and backs onto the largest plant nursery in Brussels, les Pépinières de Boitsfort.
This past weekend we all skipped Sunday services and instead went to the FACTS expo in Ghent, which is the largest comics and sci-fi convention in Belgium. There were many booths filled with action figures, comics, swords, costumes and so forth, and many people were dressed up as their favourite characters from video games, movies, stories etc. This cosplay (from the Japanese combination word kosupure which means "costume play") is taken to extreme lengths by some people, but it all seems to be in very good fun. If you dress up then you get a few euros off your admission ticket, so perhaps if we go another time we'll have to choose a good costume. This time we just wore our Star Wars t-shirts. The one Malcolm is wearing is a real vintage one from 1977 that I found in an antique store in Toronto, still in its plastic bag, with a $1.99 Dominion Grocery sticker still on it. He only wears it on very special occasions, as I am sure that if it was washed on a normal cycle it would disintegrate pretty quickly.
What I enjoyed the most was not the commercial booths, but rather the fan village, which had booths from all sorts of fan clubs; the club Teekay-421, the Rebel Legion Benelux, the Jedi Order (for Star Wars) the Belgian Whovians, the Star Trek Voyagers and so on. There was a group of people who machine R2 units out of aluminum, and build their own electronics to go inside them. One group had action figure boxes... I'd like to collect this limited edition figurine pictured below, but maybe it's more valuable if I keep it in the box?
There was a booth for a company that restores and sells vintage video arcade games, so Duncan had a go.
All in all it was a little exhausting. I found myself more and more reminded of the film Galaxy Quest as the day went on...
So many people crammed into such a space is quite terrifying for me now; I find myself drained by spending any length of time in a crowd, and so I soon found myself wishing for a TARDIS to whisk us all back home immediately...
This was about as close as we got; the Belgian Whovians had built their own TARDIS and so we had a photo taken...
A lot of the people who go to these comics conventions are excited about celebrity visits... Carrie Fisher was there, but it cost over 50 EUR to get our picture taken with her, so we decided against it. Sylvester McCoy (who played the seventh incarnation of Doctor Who) was to be there but he cancelled at the last minute, and we weren't excited about any of the other celebrities, and we started to get pretty tired out, so we took a break to get outside where there was more oxygen to watch a little bit of the Quidditch match that was underway.
We needed a little rest time, because the real reason for going to FACTS in the first place was to take part in a workshop run by Aardman Animation animator George Watson, who showed us how to make a Gromit figure out of plasticene, and we wanted to be in a good state of attention. George was a good teacher; we all had our hand at trying out model making and are now the proud owners of four Gromit figures in various finishes. There is a new Shaun the Sheep movie coming out shortly from Aardman, and we are looking forward to viewing it with an apprentice's watchful eye, now that we have completed a little training...
But back to the Creation: we have a second performance on Sunday, but by then Maggie will already be in Canada. She's leaving Saturday morning for a week with her parents at the cottage, lucky thing... I'll try to convince her to do a photo-rich guest blog post when she gets back... next week will be fairly quiet for me artistically as both boys will be home for the Toussaint vacation...
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