It's been a good week musically so far. My personal rehearsal of the Christus part has been going well, and the continuo rehearsal that I had yesterday in Bruges was a really positive experience; everyone involved agreed that it was a luxury to take so much time to explore the work. The musicians are of such a high calibre and have performed this piece many times (by comparison I am inexperienced, having only sung the Matthäuspassion Christus once before) but they still get very excited about making decisions together with the guidance of the conductor. I am really feeling like I am moving up a notch in my career by performing with these musicians.
As well I have confirmed some more work for the last bit of the season: the choral workshop that I gave the European Commission Choir back on the third of March went so well that the conductor has asked me to do another session, this time on the 16th of June! As I have said often to our kids while at table, anyone can be invited to tea with the Queen once; it's the people with good manners who get asked back a second time.
So the schedule now looks really quite packed... After this coming weekend and most of next week, I am pretty much busy until the Minimes Bach Cantata concert on the 23rd of June. I also need to stay healthy as there are few breaks in between.
- rehearse 8th April, perform 14th April Matthäuspassion near Antwerp
- 15th-19th April Johannespassion Canary Islands
- 20th-23rd April Luther Mass Waltershausen Germany
- 24th April to Toronto
- rehearse 27th, perform 28th Belleville Choral Society
- rehearse May 1st and 4th, perform May 5th, Elijah Toronto
- 6th May until ... ? audition / coach / work / sort / pack / sell things in Toronto
- 8th June, my parents' 50th wedding anniversary party
- 11th June fly home to Brussels
- 16th June choral workshop
- 18th, 22nd rehearse, 23rd June perform Bach BWV 147
This morning the transporter came to take the car away. As I may have explained the insurance company judged it to be an economic write-off so we sold the car as-is to a company in Hungary. They will ship it there and I assume fix it up and resell it.
I for one am really sad to see "Schnelli" go, but we are going to be test-driving a one-year-old VW Golf (sadly not a cabrio) on Saturday, and I'm doing more research this week. Maggie likes the look of the Mini Clubman, and there are other options that we are investigating. In the meantime the garage has given us a replacement car for a maximum of six days, until we make some other arrangement.
Our friend Simonas turns 20 years old today, and we are going to have him here as our guest on the weekend. He has requested pizza and chocolate cake, and I'm sure that we can accommodate him... so that means that there will three young adults in residence here for the weekend. That reminds me that Duncan's birthday is coming very soon, and Malcolm's 20th birthday is in about six weeks. Tempus fugit...
I received some links to the Amsterdam performance of Johannespassion; the whole thing is viewable on Youtube. As well the director has said that we could use clips for our own promotional purposes. I have contacted the film-maker and he has asked for a small fee of 50 EUR to edit the extracts of my parts of the performance. It's worth doing it, based on the quality of the video and audio, and the performance is pretty good, I think.
Here are the links if you would like to see them: I've bookmarked them for my three arias but you can watch the whole thing if you want.
Betrachte meine Seel
https://youtu.be/TWPBxzwCLDc?t=511
Eilt, ihr angefochtnen Seelen
https://youtu.be/TWPBxzwCLDc?t=1718
Mein teurer Heiland
https://youtu.be/cFEphoBdHtY?t=403
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment