Robbie Burns; busy times at school; Belgian COVID situation

It's Robbie Burns Night tonight, on the 25th of January.  For the first time in several years we aren't hosting the Burns supper at the church, or preparing our speeches or poems or songs.  I think that I'll dig a haggis out of the freezer here at home though, and have it with bashed neeps and tatties, just the three of us (kilts optional)...

Since last I wrote I have had most of my time occupied with marking assignments and writing individualised report card comments for the music students.  This took up most of my Christmas holiday time and bled into the first two weeks of school.  Fortunately, that was all taken care of over a week ago, so I could settle down to getting ready for the Grease performances, slated for this coming Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Sunday.

But as Burns wrote, in To a mouse:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

         Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

          For promis’d joy!

We resumed rehearsals on Wednesday the 6th of January, with the idea of preparing the show as planned, and then filming it scene by scene with the two different casts.  Then we would edit it together into one show for each cast, and had arranged to livestream the shows on two different nights.  We had abondoned hope of giving the kids a chance to perform in front of live audience, but thought that our plan would allow us to at least produce something like a full production, albeit one that was stitched together.

The local authorities had different ideas.  About halfway through our rehearsal on the 6th we saw an email from the school administration instructing us to shut down immediately.  Since school had resumed after Christmas holiday, in-person classes have been allowed to proceed, with one school year taking class remotely in weekly rotation to reduce the number of students present each day.  But the critical thing is that the grades have been restricted from any kind of group activity across grade "bubbles".  As we have students from grades 9-12 in our production it became clear that further group rehearsal was going to be impossible.

Needless to say we were all pretty discouraged, but soon came up with a plan: we will postpone Grease by a year from its original timing, and remount it with the same cast in November of 2021.  Most of the cast is in grades 9-11, with only five students in their senior year, so with some minimal recasting we should be able to bring the show up to speed quickly, and we also hope that by then the vaccination schedule and continued confinement measures might allow for enough of a reduction in COVID numbers that we could have a live audience.  

This meant that the seniors (two of which are playing Danny and Sandy, the romantic leads) we decided to create a filmed showreel with a few selected songs:

• opening dialogue scene that introduces the different characters
• Summer Nights (the big opening duet for Sandy and Danny and chorus)
• Greased Lightning (Kenickie solo with male chorus)
• dialogue scene that introduces Hand Jive
• Hand Jive (full cast dance)
• dialogue scene that follows the Hand Jive
• Hopelessly Devoted to You (Sandy solo)
• Sandy (Danny Solo)
• You're the One that I Want (closing duet for Sandy and Danny and chorus)

The complication is that we can't rehearse the kids together, or film their performances in a group.  So all last week after school we've been staying late in the improvised recording studio that we've set up in the technician booth of the theatre, recording the kids voice parts one by one.  As you can imagine, it's exhausting: most of the kids have never recorded with headphones and a backing track before, and a lot of retakes and retouchings are needed to get their tracks in a useable state.  Not all of them are confident to sing on their own, and they haven't been able to rehearse for a while, so their harmony parts aren't so secure.  I went in to the studio beforehand and sang each and every harmony voice part myself to make "ghost tracks" that each student would be able to hear it in their ear while they were recording their part.

As well, I have to conduct each one of them with the score on my lap; that is tiring as well!  For example, with the fifteen boys in Greased Lightning, in the course of a single three hour session, I must have conducted the piece about fifty times!  After a day of classes, and private voice students at lunchtime, to then go into the studio for three hours leaves me incredibly tired.  But hopefully it will all be worth it, and then we will have a decent audio track for each of them.  Fortunately Laurent our theatre technical director is handling the audio recording and the technical side of mixing, so by next week we should have audio tracks that sound good enough to use.

mixing the tracks with my lucky lab coat,
an homage to the early days of studios,
where the sound engineers were scientists

At that point the work of filming the kids individually will begin, and for synchronisation purposes we'll play back the recording while they lip-synch it, then separate the audio track from the video, and use our clean studio version instead in the final edit.  The editing of that video is going to take a lot of time, and that will be primarily Thom's job but I will help him with it also.

All this is going on while classes are happening.  Today I'm lucky that I don't have classes my monday is open on alternate weeks) so have stayed home to rest until I go in for the recording session, and so have been cleaning the kitchen and baking loaves of bread for the week.  The weather has actually been pretty good here for the last little while with temperatures usually a little above zero, and today it's sunny out.  Last weekend Bryan and Kiana and Lawrence and I went to a nature reserve south of Liege for a nice 17km run on some fairly aggressive trails, and I ran here midweek, and again yesterday, so I'm keeping up the kilometrage, and Yoshi likes the exercise.

 

Anyway, I hope that all of you are doing well, and keeping healthy.  We received some very sad news that Sameh, the partner of our dear friend and conductor Peter Tomek, has died in Berlin from COVID complications.  While Duncan, Camille, Thom, and Marie-Pierre have all had COVID and recovered, I realise that Sameh is the first person that we know directly who has died from this illness.  We send our condolences to Peter, and pray that we won't add any more names to the list of personal friends who have passed due to this pandemic, and I have the same wishes for each of you.

Our numbers in Belgium are relatively good... as you can see by this graph, the new cases seem to have leveled off since early November, and are more or less stable at about 2000 new cases per day.

new cases October 17th - January 17th

That seems high, as the peak of the first wave in Belgium in April was around the same number, but it's a great improvement over our second wave numbers at the end of October, where we peaked at around 22,000 new cases per day.

St. John's has gone a couple of months now without a case at our school, so we're hoping that continues.  The first vaccinations have started, but at present they have covered only a tiny percentage of the population: 1.67% of the general population, and 2.09% of the adult population have received the first dose of the ModeRNA vaccine.  We're not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.
 
I have started discussions with the school about staying on for another year as music teacher; that seems wise given the fact that we are still in the thick of this pandemic, and a return to live performance is still a complete question mark. 

Yesterday the Flemish Baroque concert scheduled for April 25th, and meant to replace our cancelled Homilius passions from last March, was again cancelled, this time because of an administrative difficulty with the commune...  That means that the only other thing on the books is the Beethoven Mass in C this November in the Netherlands, and maybe the faculty artist recital of Winterreise with Dina and Bruce, sometime in 2022, at Queen's?

In any case, we are both lucky to have our work, financial income, a safe home, good food, and our health.  It's important to be grateful, because as my late grandmother used to say, "It could be worse."  Sending you each our warm greetings and hopes for your continued health...