June is Bustin' Out All Over (1945)

 

1945 seems like a long while ago... but based on the crazy behaviour of our students, not THAT long ago...

Lots happening here in June.  We closed our production of Guys and Dolls with great success, and the kids had a great time.  We're looking forward to autumn of next year when we produce Les Miserables which promises to be rather exciting, especially given our talent pool of enthusiastic students.

Speaking of talent we just heard that one of our grade 10 singers/actor/dancers who played Cinderella in our Into the Woods has been accepted (exceptionally) into the Royal Junior Academy of Music in London!  Normally they don't take students outside of the UK, but she made an impression and will be commuting every weekend from Belgium to London to take her Saturday classes.  They have also recognised that she is a "legit" soprano so they are steering her also towards classical repertoire, which I'm very happy about.  There are many cases when you have a private singing student whom you have advised has the chops and the instrument to do classical music, but it's quite another thing for their family to hear the same advice from an independent professional, so I am very pleased for her and hope that both she and her parents will listen to this good advice...  Watch this space.

This past week I've been busy with the Family Day performances with the choir as well as the grade 9 and 10 rock bands... 

Should I stay or should I go?  Grade 9

Twist and Shout Grade 10

Consider these a rehearsal for the 20th of June.  Now I'm busy preparing the grade 6/7 boy sopranos to perform the ripieno choir parts for the Bach St. Matthew that I'll be singing on the 7th June, right after our larger school choir opens the grade 12 Graduation ceremony.  I'm probably going to have to bundle them all into the school van immediately after their performance of Bruckner's Locus iste and the anonymous Gaudeamus Iguitur to make it to the generale on time, but I'm pretty sure that the timing will work...

For Bach, we had the first rehearsal yesterday and the boys are really excited about this coming weekend's performance, and they did rather well considering that it was their first moment with a bunch of strangers and an unfamiliar conductor.  Again I am struck by how many wonderful opportunities to teach good singing practice there are in Bach's ripieno part: rules about phrasing, dynamics in rising intervals, the old idea of breathing where the text allows for a question... boring stuff for the non-singers but familiar to me, and also to composers who wrote later music (like Guys and Dolls) and soon, I hope, to them.  Our kids are really doing very well at internalising these ideas, and presenting them calmly and confidently.

Then it's shifting gears for me the following weekend to sing the Bass solo in the Mozart Requiem in Den Hoorn, arranged by my Netherlands agency, and then shifting back home to the final end of year concerts of the classical recital with choral, solo, and ensemble classical works, including the Beethoven Fidelio quartet for my private students, as well as the Rock Extravaganza, then a mass in Antwerp for me, and probably the Hockey version of O Canada at the embassy again... 

I feel like this year, my fifth at the school, has really been a productive one.  I feel a lot more comfortable than ever before, knowing that the T's have been crossed and the I's have been dotted academically, and now we can just make beautiful music together until the end of the year... Fingers crossed!