Goodbye, Dolly; Hello... Canada... or Japan?

The Dolly! shows unfolded remarkably well; the kids turned it on in the last week and with a lot of intensive work from the direction tightened up a lot of the things that needed fixing.  As well the production team was in overdrive most of the week, which meant that we were pretty tired when we finally closed on Sunday early evening after the matinee.

It was a real pleasure to work on this production.  As I explained to the Principal of the school afterwards, music directing ninety-three singer/dancer/actors in such a big show was a definite stretch goal for me, but one that I feel like I met.  One reason that it was difficult musically was the sheer size of the cast.  As well, there have been a lot of recent changes in the music teaching staff at St. John's, and that has meant that there wasn't the same kind of singing momentum there as in years gone by, so it was a bit of a struggle sometimes to teach them harmonies and to get them really singing.  But in any case they all worked very hard and by the end they were making some pretty exciting sounds.

I have no plans to participate in any official way as a member of the musical staff in the future, but certainly I plan to come at least once a week and give private voice lessons to a couple of the senior students who have approached me about continuing to sing.  There are some really beautiful voices there and I would like to do what I can to help them establish good vocal habits.

The day after we closed I didn't sit on the sofa and binge-watch Netflix but went into Brussels to see a free concert + lecture hosted by the Flemish Radio Choir.  It's conducted by my friend Bart Van Reyn, who gave me my first little contract way back in 2007, around this time of year.  James MacMillan is a rather famous composer from Scotland, and they had performed one of his pieces last week in a big performance.  This was rather more intimate and offered a chance to examine one of his compositions, the Miserere in finer detail.  The composer conducted the choir in their performance of the piece, and then we went back to the beginning and took it again section by section, with MacMillan answering questions from the interviewer and explaining his own approach to the composition.  It was fascinating to see and hear and the music is wonderfully affecting.  I found myself with goose pimples many times, and as a harmony geek I shivered with pleasure many times during the performance.

You can actually watch it being live streamed here...

The odd thing was that for such a prestigious ensemble and composer, there was almost no one there: apart from Bart and the people doing the livestream filming and audio recording, there were perhaps four people in the audience!

But more interestingly I had a chance to see Bart for the first time in at least five years.  And I also realised that I know, and have sung with, almost a dozen of the professional singers in the choir.  One of them is my friend Joris Derder, with whom I have sung the Bach Passions many times.

Joris and I chatted a bit and then he had an idea about suggesting me for a project... and so yesterday I received an email from the administrator of La Petite Bande, a world-famous Flemish ensemble that was one of the first proponents of the "early music" revival that happened in the 1970s, and continues to the present day.  They are celebrated internationally, and often tour, and they were looking for a couple of baritones to do the ripieno parts in the Matthew Passion, in November 2020, in Japan.

It is a modest gig: ripieno is Italian for "padding" or "stuffing", and in an instrumental ensemble they are the extra players who join the solo instrumentalists in the orchestra to make a fuller sound.  In the case of this project, the job is to sing the small solo recitatives of the characters of Pilatus, Petrus, and the False Witnesses.  The cool thing is that I have tried to audition for La Petite Bande before, but they never gave me a shot.  Now I get to go on tour with them, and it seems likely that I'll manage to get in a proper audition at some point in the process.

I have already contacted Gediminas and Rasa in Tokyo and they have invited me to stay on a bit longer and spend time with them... the dates  of the performances are October 31st (Osaka) November 1st (Fukuoka) and November 3rd (Tokyo).

As well I notice that these dates will correspond with the Toussaint vacation, so I am thinking seriously about bringing at least Maggie and maybe also the boys over with me.  The cost looks to be around 550 EUR return per person, so that might be manageable, especially since we have friends there...