Lots of singing; Maggie in Switzerland; the kittens are coming

L'eglise Saint-Jacques-sur-Coudenberg

Tuesday September 25th, 2018

Last post I talked about an upcoming Bach solo cantata; this afternoon I had a rehearsal with cellist Julius Stenzel and conductor Jacques Vanherenthals, prior to the general rehearsal that will take place on Friday afternoon.  This will be followed very quickly by the performance itself.  I am feeling good about it, and both of them were very happy with what I am doing with the piece.  It's a tremendous privilege to interpret this solo cantata, with such a good group of musicians and in such a glorious performance space...

Whenever we have visitors to Brussels, we take them on a walking tour of the old central part of the city, and often we start off at the statue of Godefroi de Bouillon, pictured above.  His image is positioned so that the church is directly behind him, with the Magritte museum slightly to his left, and the Museum of Fine Art to his far left, and he is shown looking down the long slope of the Mont des Arts, directly toward the spire of the Hôtel de Ville of Bruxelles, which is in the Grand'Place.  So it will be very satisfying to sing this large solo cantata on this ground that we know very well.  The concert is in memoriam of Fernand Jacquet, who died this past August.  He was a doctor of law, and collected many other honours, and was a long-time patron of the Choir and Orchestra of the Chapelle des Minimes.

I actually have quite a few musical projects all being prepared around the same time, so it's been keeping me quite busy.  Last Friday I had a long rehearsal with soprano Rita Matos Alves, and mezzo Isabelle Everaerts de Velp, and the other singers who are preparing the Monteverdi concert for this time next month.  We sang through four of the approximately fifteen madrigals and had long conversations about the project and got to know each other a bit.  We also needed to schedule quite a few more rehearsals for the next few weeks, to prepare this programme properly.  It's going to be quite cool, and I can already think of some other people that I can suggest it to.  The artistic director of the Festival de Namur comes to mind, but there are of course many others.  It's really fantastic music.  I especially love the harmonies in this one Gesualdo piece; they are wonderfully crunchy!  Have a listen...

After today's rehearsal with Julius and Jacques I came back home and sang through a bunch of opera music, as I have an early morning first rehearsal of a programme of opera arias, duets, trios and quartets that is happening in Zeeland in the Netherlands in another couple of weeks.  Most of the music is not terribly difficult to read but it all is a good healthy sing, and I haven't really had to do any opera for a little while, so it's tiring for the voice if one isn't used to it.  But it will all work out. Bellini, Mozart, Puccini, Purcell, Verdi; lots of good music and lots of ensembles to share.  As well they have asked for the 'Toreador' song; why not?  Bruce made sure to teach me all of the special conventions that aren't in the score, and fortunately I will have the other singers there to provide the "chorus" of Frasquita, Carmen, et al... it's funny, but having just a few measures of rest in a big aria like that, to give you time to swallow and reëstablish the breath make all the difference in providing a thrilling ending.  Fortunately I think there is nothing new here for me to learn, but I haven't sung the Soave sia il vento (from Cosi fan tutte of Mozart) and the Bella figlia d'amore (from Rigoletto of Verdi) since I did a concept concert in maybe 2002 in Toronto.  Of course the famous Libiamo from La Traviata is well printed into memory, as I sang it with the Kingston Symphony back in the 1990s, and again in 2012 with the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie here in Brussels.

I have added a few more Bach cantatas to the schedule; I have been asked to sing two quite nice cantatas with good arias at the end of October, just before the madrigals concert.  As well Julius has asked if I might be available to sing the Christmas Oratorio Part IV, and Cantata BWV 40, which has a great aria for the bass, so I am hoping that happens.  The Christmas Oratorio was I think the first big Bach piece that Peter Tomek coached me in, and Part IV was what I sang first with Stephanie Martin and the Pax Christi Chorale in Toronto in 2009, so it is something that I know quite well.  It's always great to revisit beautiful music that you have prepared and performed before.  As my repertoire grows it happens more frequently that I am refreshing a piece rather than learning it cold, and that's a great thing.

On the weekend my neighbour Christophe and Malcolm and I went to see a concert of Jazz music "dans la fosse" of a garage in Rixensart.  Christophe grew up in that town and so the organiser of the concerts and many of the people who attend are old friends.  It's really quite cool; there's a very large fosse or pit that extends underneath the garage space, and this is where they set up a stage, lights, sound system etc. 

The bar is made upstairs, by placing cloths on top of the big hoists that are used to raise big cars and trucks up off the ground, and there they serve chips and things and beer or wine.  It's really quite charming and quite good jazz players are regularly stopping in there while on tour through Europe to play a gig.  They have expressed some interest in having me sing there; maybe I will think about doing a little opera revue show that is based on the same concept as the Comische Opera Berlin project; that would certainly work in a garage... or maybe a Schubert lieder recital with guitar instead of piano (as there isn't one in the garage!).

As well Christophe and I have been talking about the first week of November; he and Isabelle have made plans to go south.  His father owned a large area of land in Tuscany, in Chianti in a village called San Vincente, and after his father died the property was passed on to the children.  Christophe is between contracts right now (in fact he just was hired for a new job after his last one ended a couple of weeks ago) but he's already decided that he is going to go to Tuscany to pick olives and make artisanal olive oil during the week of November 4th to 10th.

As you probably know I like to cook, and like gardening, and brewing, and the idea of picking and pressing olives in Tuscany sounded intriguing.  The long and the short of it is that as I have no musical work that week, and nothing new that is pressing (haha) to sing in the later part of November or December, I have decided to buy a RyanAir flight to Rome on the 3rd November.  Christophe will meet me there when he drops his partner Isabelle off to fly to Brussels, and he and I will go do the olive oil.

It promises to be quite hard work; you have to cut down the tall grass and bushes, and then spread out nets under the trees; then one has to rake the olives off the branches onto the nets, and then gather them up before you transport them to the pressing apparatus.  The estimate is that 10kg of olives makes 1L of cold-pressed oil, so you can see that we will have to gather a lot.  It's not quite the same as the 40:1 ratio of maple sap to syrup... but I'm quite interested to do it, as it is something that people have been doing for a very long time in that part of the world, and of course also because I use olive oil all the time in cooking, and it's nice to find out in personal terms how your food is made.  Here's a link to another blog about the olive oil harvest in the Rome area.

I will need to be in good shape to do that hard physical work, and I should be healed up by then; since I last wrote I had a spill while on unfamiliar terrain, and rolled over on my right ankle when running through some leaves and chestnut casings in the forest.  I sprained my ankle quite definitely, and it began to swell immediately... I had driven the five or six kilometers to the trailhead on the scooter, and managed to drive home, put some ice on the ankle, and then head to the clinic, where I had it x-rayed and taped up and immobilized within a couple of hours.  It's still bruised and tender (I'll spare you the photos) but I am able to walk on it without any pain or trouble, just some stiffness and lack of proper movement because of the tape.

I have a physical medicine specialist appointment on thursday, so I expect that I will know more about it then, and probably I will need a bit of physiotherapy.  The little bit of reading that I have done about ankle sprains indicates that nearly all of them can be managed by rest, immobilisation, ice and elevation, and almost none of them need surgery to correct the ligament damage.  That's good news for me, and I hope to get out there and do some trail running again, but don't know when that will happen until the doctor has a look.

mountain river in Saas Grund

Glacier-driven millwheels

Maggie has been away since early Sunday morning; I got up early that morning to get her to school for six a.m. I have only seen a few photos but it would seem that she is having a great time in Switzerland with her class.  I was planning initially to go with her but this Ich habe genug concert came up and it was too good a gig to pass up.  She should be back this weekend late Friday night.

As she has been away and Malcolm too, it's been just Duncan and I and the chickens... until last night, when I added a couple of new residents to 112 Chaussee de Louvain: "Bonnie" and "Clyde", a pair of brother and sister cats that were up for adoption from the "Waterloo Help Cats" site.  Kiana had heard that we were looking for sibling cats, and spotted the ad.  After meeting them last week, I decided to go ahead with it, and had an interview with someone from the organisation, and then went to pick them up from their foster family last night.

They are very nice little cats, maybe four months old at this point.  The sister, "Bonnie" is really extremely shy and timid; at the time that I am writing this on a notebook computer and ignoring her, she has finally come out from under the bed and is playing with a stick and some string that I brought up here.  Her brother "Clyde" is a bit of a goofball, extremely active but also very friendly, soliciting affection and purring up a storm.  I am hoping that she will become less timid, but for the moment we have them in Malcolm's empty room, and are waiting until they get out and explore the rest of the house on their own initiative.  For the moment they seem happy to hang out in Malcolm's room, which is the smallest and quietest room in the house... here are some photos.