Wednesday morning was quite good weather, almost thirteen degrees and clear, so I had my first run in about three weeks. After my illness in early January and my holiday from running I didn't break any personal speed or distance records, but it was still good to get out there and "blow out the carbon".
Wednesday evening we left Duncan at home and drove off to Lawrence and Tiffany's to look after their three kids. Since they moved out of Brussels proper to Hélécine, they have been enjoying country life, but they haven't yet found a local babysitter. They had bought tickets for a concert in Brussels but were stuck for someone to look after the kids, and we were happy to oblige. It's been a long while since we have had to put little ones to bed ourselves, but it all soon came back to us, and I was happy to read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" once again.
Thursday I had a long day on the highway. After leaving at 7 am to drive Maggie to work, I drove into Brussels to drop off two bags of coal. Benoit our luthier friend has a coal stove in his storefront, and he agreed to take the coal that Malcolm and I shovelled out of our little coal room at the front of the house. It was full of dirt and dust, so I took advantage of the refuse container and sifted out the coal from the dirt using a garden riddle, and managed to reduce the volume by two-thirds, but we still ended up with two large and very heavy sacks. I am glad that he will make use of the coal as it would be a shame to throw it away, and I can't use it in our wood stove.
After a coffee with Benoit I drove west to make a number of stops for supplies... At the Sint-Bernardus brewery I bought some 2017 special edition magnums of Abt 12 and a tin sign for Bryan. Then I drove to Lille, and bought a dozen bottles of Hecht and Bannier wine, before driving back to Sint-Sixtus to pick up my two cases of Westvleteren 12. Then it was back to Waterloo to pick up Maggie... I don't drive those kind of distances very often, and it was fun to have a road trip, but tiring.
Friday I took the bus into town and got my hair cut, and then came home to do some more work on the house. The spare parts arrived for my shop vacuum, so I rode my bike out to the hardware store a short distance out of town to pick them up. I also spent some time writing my master-of-ceremonies notes for Saturday evening's Burns Supper.
Saturday was a very long day: I was invited by Eric Delson, the conductor of the Brussels Choral Society and the Head of Music at the International School of Brussels, to be an adjuticator for the AMIS Solo and Ensemble Festival. The Association for Music in International Schools is an organisation based in the Hague in the Netherlands, and they have been holding festivals for international student musicians for many years. These have proved to be so popular that they have spurred the creation of a number of satellite festivals in different european cities, and this is the second time that I have been asked to help judge the singers at the festival in Brussels. This time they split the vocalists into three sections, and two singers that I've worked with before also were involved in the judging... my friend the soprano Laura Ford was responsible for the low voice female soloists and ensembles; soprano Ismini Giannakis handled the higher female voices, and I had the male voices, and the male and mixed ensembles.
It was really a very energising experience to work with these singers, ranging from 11-17 years in age. I ended up working with seventeen different singers over the course of the day, with only fifteen minutes given to each one, but that's still enough time to help them. The way it works is that they come in with their accompanist, hand me a copy of the music, introduce their piece, and start singing. Then I make some comments, ask some questions, and then choose a few aspects of their performance to work on. We repeat sections of their piece to try to get them thinking about how to take their technique to the next level. Usually they have an audience of their friends and other singers or musicians in the room as well.
The differences in development across singers were huge, and it was very clear to me as the day went on which schools have a strong classical focus and which are more oriented towards jazz or pop music. ISB is one of the schools that fortunately has a strong classical focus, so I was able to do a lot more with those students than I could with some of the others. Many of the younger kids brought Disney songs to present, and others chose pop songs from the radio, or very recent musical theatre pieces that I didn't know. Some them clearly learned the songs from a recording and then scrambled to find a free online copy of the music, which doesn't necessarily correspond to what their pianist is playing. Apart from the generally poor scores, often these pop songs and musical theatre pieces are very poorly written musically, have bad accompaniment, are in the wrong keys for the singer (i.e. too low or too high) or are not very easy to sing in a healthy way. But I still have to do something to help the kids move forward, so sometimes I focus on mental acting choices, or general performance technique, or in the case of ensembles, listening to each other, voice blending, etc. Always there is not enough breathing; they breathe too little, or at the very last minute before starting to sing, which makes them start late or sing the first note under pitch, and most of them don't open their mouths wide enough to let the colours of their voices come out.
There were some real standouts though, and those were really very rewarding and exciting to work with... at the end of the day we had a half-hour to do a masterclass with selected students, and rather than just going over the same pieces, I suggested to the other voice judges that we each choose two from our respective groups, and present a shared masterclass in the large atrium of ISB. This way the selected kids perform for a larger audience made up of all of the singers, and the other voice teachers can weigh in, and all of the singers can learn from watching the performances.
We ended up with two choral ensembles and four soloists, and all of the voice students attended as part of the audience. It was really very exciting for all three of us voice teachers to see our students perform again, and even more pleasurable was to see the students put into practice what we had tried to help them improve in the earlier sessions. My soloist choice was Adam, a twelve-year old boy soprano, who sang "Sebben, crudele", an aria from Antonio Caldara's 1710 opera, La costanza in amor vince l'inganno (Faithfulness in love conquers treachery). It was really a wonderful breath of fresh air during my day to hear CLASSICAL SINGING and so I was able to do a lot with him, and with the piece. I was really very proud of him when he performed so well in front of a large audience. Interestingly he also was invited to play at the piano masterclass! That's very good news as he won't be able to sing as a boy soprano forever. But it's clear that he is focussed and disciplined, and his parents and his friends are all very supportive of his musical activities, and I can tell that he is going places artistically. A student like that makes one excited about teaching; I can see why Bruce does it...
To say thank-you the organisation invited us out for dinner, but I had to decline, and instead took the tram over to St. Andrew's Church of Scotland to get changed and help with some last-minute preparations for the annual Burn Supper. Maggie was the head chef, and she had been busy the evening before peeling and chopping, and went into the church kitchen in the late morning to start making the scotch broth. I purchased about five kilograms of mixed lamb neck, shank, and shoulder cuts from the Boucherie Habib here in Wavre, and they went into the soup, while the main dinner involved lamb haggis from the British Store along with the mashed potatoes and rutabaga. As well different people made trifle and tablet for the dessert. She said that she hasn't cooked for sixty people since her Camp Mazinaw days...
piping in the Chieftan haggis
Scotch broth
The whole Burns Supper went off without a hitch, and we ended up raising more than 2000 EUR, to be shared among three different charities. Maggie did a great job with her supporting staff and everyone had a great time. We had enough people that the tear-down went fairly quickly, although we were pretty tired out when we finally made it home and fell into bed, at close to one in the morning.
Needless to say we slept in a bit on Sunday morning, and then got up to tidy the house for the arrival of Raoul and Luisa. I made another trip to Habib to pick up the supplies for couscous, which involved two or three hours of cooking, this time by me... I used about 800g of lamb shoulder spiced with a mixture suggested by the butcher, and six marinated chicken drumsticks which I seared and then braised in the soup, and eight merguez lamb sausages for the meat, grilled and added to the plates just before serving. The soup included chickpeas, courgettes (zucchini), aubergines (eggplant), navet (white turnips), potiron (squash), onions, carrots, and chicken stock, added in a specific order.
We had originally hoped to have Malcolm home for that meal, but he was feeling tired from a cold, and a long band rehearsal the day before, so he opted to stay home in Laeken. However we did receive some good news about his marks: he received extremely high results, including the highest mark in his class in technical building. This is perhaps very slightly less impressive than it sounds, as his first-year guitar class is now down to only three students, from nine at the beginning of the year, but they are great marks nonetheless. The small number of students means that there is a lot of direct contact and supervision from the teachers, which is a very good thing, and those students who remain are, like him, very serious and focussed. He tells us that he has "closed the box" which means that he has glued the top, back, neck, and sides of his classical guitar together, which means that he is starting to get close to finishing the instrument. Many first-year students don't complete their project instrument, and while he hasn't said so, I suspect that he will complete his, and perhaps start on some other supplementary project before the year is out.
In other musical news, I have received a contract to sing an operetta in Toronto at the end of April this year with Toronto Operetta Theatre, at the Jane Mallet Theatre in the St. Lawrence Centre. It has been a dozen years since I've performed with TOT; the last was in 2005 in Il barberillo de Lavapiès, a Spanish zarzuela in which I played the villain. I haven't been seen in a staged production in central Toronto in almost as long, so it's going to be great to come back to Toronto to work on La Belle Hélène... there will be three performances, on April 27th, 28th, and 29th. That means that I now have four projects during that trip: La Belle Hélène, the Brahms Requiem on May 6th, a Sunday performance of some Bach at Kingston Road United Church with Toronto Symphony bassist Tim Dawson, and then No Tenors Allowed at the Royal Theatre Gananoque with Bruce and Dina on May 19th.
Today I am going to do some more plaster removal, and then will be welcoming Andrew Gardner and Oliver Boucher to the house for lunch... my friend Scott is in town to sing Tonio in Pagliacci at La Monnaie the end of March, and he's doing a road trip of his own tomorrow to pick up some of his thing that were in storage in Nancy, so he should be coming by in the afternoon, so we might have a fourth for a late lunch. Tomorrow morning early I'm meeting up with Bryan to have a longer run in Bousval with him, which should help burn off some of the extra calories that I've been taking in over the past few days... I hope you have a pleasant week!
postscript (from Sunday's Facebook status):
Talk about a series of bizarre coincidences. Yesterday while adjuticating the male and mixed vocal soloists and ensembles at the AMIS Solo & Ensemble Festival at the International School of Brussels, I met a music teacher, pianist, trumpeter, and all-around nice guy, who was there to accompany his students from the International School of Luxembourg. When it came out that we were both from Canada, we soon realised that we had both attended Queen's School of Music at around the same time, and indeed, even performed on the stage together as sailors in H.M.S. Pinafore with the Kingston Symphony, at Fort Henry in 1996, in a production that included Denise Oucharek, Paul Grindlay, Torin Chiles, among many others, and which was conducted by Glen Fast. What an unlikely moment, to meet James Libbey once again, after so many years. I am sure that James also played many of my rehearsals with Queen's Choral ensemble while Mark Sirrett was conducting.
Then that evening, as I hosted the annual Burns Night at St. Andrew's Church of Scotland, Brussels, I met Rob from Kentucky, and his wife Nathalie, who, when she heard I was Canadian, said, "Oh yes, I was born in Canada. Have you ever heard of Belleville, Ontario?"
I advise you never to say anything bad about anyone in a public place, as a relative or friend is likely sitting in the booth directly behind you...
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