More storms; weekend activities; back to school for boys; getting ready for Homilius

Right after I hit "publish" on last Wednesday's blog post I went to rehearse, and it started to hail!  It's just par for the course here in Belgium: the last three weekends have each involved major storms, with heavy winds and lots of rain, and the weather during the week hasn't been much better.  Fortunately our new roof is just fine: there were no leaks and we didn't lose any tiles from the roof.  But we have been burning lots of firewood to keep the house toasty.

On Monday I took Yoshi for his vaccinations, and as I was starting to feel better after being ill the preceeding week, decided to run the 5km to the vet, and then back again. Yoshi is doing fine and his weight hasn't much changed since the last visit.  This veterinarian is great, and I had thought that we were going to have to find another one when I heard that he was retiring, but it turns out that he is only stopping the walk-ins part of the practice and will still take clients by rendez-vous.

I also ran a long 17km on Friday, and then did another 10km yesterday... plus Maggie also went running yesterday, so Yoshi is definitely getting his mileage in.  Not just Yoshi though... I took Duncan to Decathlon on the weekend and bought him some new running shoes, and on Saturday we went for his first training run here in Wavre.  He has the admittance test for the Junior Paratrooper training coming up later in March and so will need to run a fairly quick 2.4 km among other things.  So I took him out to a section of straight pedestrian walkway that is about 600m long, and timed him while he ran.  He's pretty fast...

I also bought a chin-up bar as that is another paratrooper admission test, and I'm hoping that we can train him up to that in time.  He's got a good base fitness from gym class and his twice weekly karate sessions, but it's good to see him stretching his limits a bit.

Maggie made some great progress on her "bluebell path" embroidery project during the week she had off, and she is continuing in the evenings and on weekends... the photo above represents about eight months' work, and she's maybe 1/3rd complete.  

On Saturday, Malcolm and I had an interesting experience: we both went into the recording studio in Mechelen!

Last year a Flemish television show called #LikeMe, along the lines of  "High School Musical" or "Glee", was released.  Like these two American shows, #LikeMe explores the experiences of several secondary school students and their families, but the differences are that firstly, #LikeMe is largely a drama, not a comedy; and secondly, it is based on the "revue" format.  By this I mean that the songs are not new songs that were written for or naturally emerge from the narrative, but instead are all well-known popular Flemish songs from the 1960s-1980s with a story that is written after the fact to try to tie the songs together.  (This type of musical entertainment was most popular in between the first and second world wars, and was more or less pioneered in America by Ziegfeld with his "Follies" in New York.  After the Second World War, narrative musicals like Oklahoma! more or less replaced the revue on Broadway.)

The producer of this show had the idea of doing a revue show, with the goal that teenagers would watch it because it was a bit like "High School Musical", but their parents would watch it too, because of the more dramatic themes, and also because they recognised the songs from their own youth.  This formula appears to have worked, because it was a huge hit in Flanders and the Netherlands, and so the series has been renewed for a second season.

After this success, the production company wanted to export the series for international release, and so they decided that instead of recording many different translations, they would subtitle the series.  This was ok for the dialogue, but the international clients weren't happy with the sung Flemish, and so they decided to record all of the songs in English, as it is well-known internationally as a pop music language (think of ABBA from Sweden singing English phonetically in the 1970s).  The producers wanted North American singers, with neutral accents, for the re-recording of the songs.

Somehow the production company heard about me while I was Musical Director for Hello, Dolly!, and sent me an email asking if I could recommend some students from St. John's.  As the musical had ended, I no longer had their email addresses, but did pass on the call for auditions to the permanent teachers at the school, and a few of the kids did contact the production company, and some did audition.

After several weeks, the company was still not complete with their casting and so they called me again, and I mentioned that I had two sons who can sing, and that I was also a singer.  So they invited the three of us to audition.  While they liked Duncan's voice, it was a bit on the youthful side for the parts that they still needed to cast.  But they asked Malcolm and I back to do some of the recording work.  That is what we did on Saturday evening...

It is a big challenge to try to match the timing of the original Flemish singers, especially given that a) we didn't have a video to look at while singing, b) the original singers were not really singing from sheet music but were phrasing and ornamenting freely, and c) sometimes the English translation doesn't feel terribly easy to sing.  But we managed it ok!  I have worked in a recording studio before and have done some radio interviews so for me it was familiar, but it was my first time re-recording voice over, and Malcolm commented that this was probably his first professional gig as a voice actor/singer.  Voice acting is a very well-paying gig, and it's difficult to break into, so I'm happy for him.

Today was my last day before the rehearsals begin for the Homilius Passion Cantata, which will be performed twice this weekend and twice next, so I am hoping all will go well.  It's really quite a nice piece and not too terribly taxing for the bass, so I'm looking forward to it very much.  I also have quite a few students to teach this week, as it is the start of a new term, so I hope all goes well.