Dona nobis pacem; booking travel; sawbuck and chainsaws; Duncan home with the flu

Well I have been thinking a bit about the Dona nobis pacem, which is the next thing on my plate.  The choral society asked the soloists to write a few words about it, and then they would use that in their social media advertising.

Here's what I wrote about it:

The music of Vaughan Williams has been a part of my musical life for a long time, and his works have served as signposts throughout my professional journey.  As a young baritone, his setting of Robert Louis Stevenson's Songs of Travel was the first song cycle that I learned and performed while a student at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada.  As my singing voice grew, I was lucky to sing his Five Mystical Songs with an excellent chamber orchestra there.  After moving to Toronto for more singing opportunities, one of my first large engagements with a large professional orchestra in Toronto was his Sea Symphony, with settings of texts from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.  The experience was transformative for me.

To have the opportunity now to sing more Whitman texts in Dona nobis pacem, in Belgium, where so many Canadian soldiers served in two world wars, is an honour.  Whitman's text is deeply moving, and to be given such atmospheric legato lines, written so masterfully for the baritone voice, is a huge gift.  While the piece itself calls for a large orchestra and a big choir, Vaughan Williams chooses to make the musical texture as transparent as he can when the solo voices are singing, so as to have the maximum contrast between the solo and choral sections. It's wonderful to be handled so gently by the composer, and I will be doing my best to bring out the most expressive and clear singing that I can, so that Vaughan Williams, were he here to listen, would be pleased.  It will be also very significant for me to sing this work in English, with this ensemble, in my adopted country.

I am also thoughtful about the theme of peace...  Since this work was first performed in 1936, Europe suffered another terrible war, but peace eventually came about: since the founding of the European Union, no member state has gone to war with another.  This is a remarkable thing.  I am sure that every other singer and musician in our ensemble will be in agreement, that we will be asking for peace in the world when we perform this work.

Apart from looking at music I've been doing some travel booking; I managed to find a flight back to Canada on Expedia.be for a good price, and so have booked it so that I will arrive a couple of days before the Belleville Choral Society concert on the 28th April, and will stay until after my parents' 50th wedding anniversary party in Belleville on June 8th.  I hope to try to find some more work to do while I am back, however, as at present the only other gig I have in Canada is Elijah in Toronto on May 5th.  There are other jobs that I hope to pick up on, to make it financially worthwhile, and maybe this will be a good time to sing some auditions.

My other travel plans involve a likely trip to Berlin to see Peter Tomek, so that we can coach the Johannespassion again, and see how much of it is already memorised.  As well one of the conductors at the Comische Oper Berlin is a fellow named Adam Benzwi, whom I met in Toronto last spring during the performance of La Belle Helene.  He was there to see my colleague, the mezzo-soprano Beste Kalender, but we soon realised that we have a friend in common in Peter.  Adam has therefore already seen me perform but hasn't heard me sing in German, or in something that is in an ideal tessitura for my voice (Calchas in Helene was a bass role) so that's something else that I might try to arrange while I am there; in any case it would be good to see something at the Comische Oper.

Return flights to Berlin are less than 100 EUR, so that's not going to break the bank, and it's possible that I might be able to stay with Peter.

I had some medical stuff done this week.  Back in October I hurt my right shoulder, and it hasn't healed properly.  I had an ultrasound and an x-ray in mid-December, that seemed to indicate a lesion one of the tendons, and some irritation of the "bourse", the pad that cushions the tendon where it passes over bone, but the sports doctor suggested an "arthroscan" MRI to get a better idea of what exactly is going on inside my shoulder.

I arrived at the hospital thinking that it would be a simple scan, but was surprised when the physician started painting my whole shoulder with a disinfectant!  No one had told me the details, so I didn't realise that they'd have to freeze the shoulder and then inject radioactive iodine tracer material into the joint space itself, in order to get a good picture.  But it wasn't too painful: as is often the case, the administration of the anaesthetic is the worst part.  The whole thing went fairly quickly, and I will find out how my photos turn out when I see the doctor again, on the 30th of January.  She has office hours one morning a week at the Wavre medical centre, so that's very convenient.

Yesterday was clear and dry, so I took Yoshi to the field a short distance away and spent a good half hour throwing the tennis ball for him.  He would chase the ball all day, and with my sore shoulder I was happy for the plastic ball thrower.

When we got back I moved a bunch of things around in the garage to make room for the five face cords of oak firewood that are arriving on Saturday morning.  The wood that we cut and stacked at Bryan and Kiana's this past summer still needs to dry another season before we burn it, so Maggie and I decided that we'd pay a little extra and have some delivered, already cut, split, and dried.  As well I have a few hardwood pallets on hand, and if necessary we might have to stack some of the wood outside and cover it with plastic, if there isn't enough room in the coal room and the garage.

Then I got out some tools and built a sawbuck out of reclaimed pallet wood, and got the chainsaw running again... A small amount of the last load of firewood that we had was too long to fit inside the woodstove, so I started cutting those in half.  I only did a few logs yesterday before it started to get dark, so I'm going to head out and do that again now, if the rain holds off.  But it was enough for us to have a nice warm fire last night.

That's all for now.  Duncan is upstairs trying to rest: he came home from school early yesterday with body aches, fever, and a cough, so I have been giving him ibuprofen and chicken soup, and he's staying warm in bed.