A very busy month / guitar sanding / rock and roll fete de l’ecole / karate / bach / lutherie school signup / sailing / trail running

It's been a very busy month since last I posted, and at times I've felt a little rushed when trying to keep everything organised...

Malcolm and I have been continuing our guitar-building work.  I should say, “guitar sanding” because that’s about all we’ve managed to get done recently.  After sanding the body, I’ve applied shellac, then three coats of cellulose lacquer, sanded it smooth, applied a coat of nitrocellulose lacquer, and sanded again.

It is almost ready for the colouring stage, and we’re just waiting for Malcolm to complete the same finishing work on the body of his bass, so that we can do the "cherry burst" spray colouring at the same time.  I have almost a week's march on him (this is explained below) so he has some catching up to do.

rasping off the armrest on the front of his Fender Jazz bass body

To pick up where we left off in mid-April: I was to have run the 15km Bouillonante trail race the weekend of April 22nd, but received news that the general rehearsal for the concert on Sunday the 23rd had been rescheduled to the afternoon to accommodate the soprano soloist.  There just wasn’t enough time for me to run the race at 10h30 in the morning, finish a very difficult trail, then drive back into Brussels in time, so I had to cancel my inscription.

The latest sensation that's sweepin' the nation: Psychic Sasquatch

After the afternoon’s rehearsal Maggie and Duncan and I went to Malcolm and Duncan’s school, where the fête de l’école was already in progress.  Malcolm had been practicing for months with his classmates, and that day we witnessed the debut performance of their new band: Psychic Sasquatch.  Lucy plays drums, Victor plays the electric and acoustic guitar and sometimes bass, and Malcolm is the lead singer and primarily bassist, but he also plays acoustic and electric slide guitar.  They presented two songs (Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes, and Highway to Hell) and also took turns accompanying other singers on their performances.  It was very loud.

Psychic Sasquatch, attempting yogic flying

It was cool to see my red acoustic guitar (which Maggie gave me for my 25th birthday) back in action on the stage again, and of course my Godin electric and little tweed amp made their debuts as well. Malcolm sang strongly and played very competently, and drew some favorable informal notices that likened his baritone to Jim Morrison's; not bad for a debut.  We were extremely proud of him…

The next day it was his old man’s turn to sing old music: Bach, not rock and roll.  I was a replacement for the original baritone scheduled for this concert, who it would seem had a few issues with the range; the programme included some customary high Es but also low ones, two octaves below, which can prove problematic for baritones.  Fortunately I don't worry about the low notes, so was happy to sing them, however quietly.  It was a real success; I drew some rave reviews from both the artistic director and the conductor, who said that my performance was “really incredible, very beautiful”.

It was more than just an artistic and aesthetic success, however, but also a booster of my reputation: another Belgian conductor was there, and he told me that my recitatives were incredibly moving and well-sung… he has hired me to sing Mendelssohn’s Paulus twice in December in Brussels, and today he wrote me to say that a third performance has been added, in Wavre. Whee!

As well, the following week I shared an audio clip from the concert with a number of international conductors, including a famous Canadian conductor and musical scholar who studied with the very famous Helmuth Rilling in Detmold, Germany, some years ago.  He has forgotten more about Bach than most conductors know, and he wrote back to say that he felt I was absolutely in the first rank of Bach singers; a great compliment.  Lastly, the tenor soloist recommended me to the Maastrich University choir for a Carmina Burana in June (another baritone has withdrawn at the last minute) so that’s another gig for the calendar.  I really don’t mind being everyone’s favourite second-string baritone, as long as I either know the piece or have time to prepare for it!

I received a call from the Canadian Embassy here in Brussels; they want me to sing the Canadian and Belgian National anthems again, this time in the Cinquantenaire Museum in Brussels to celebrate Canada Day. I believe the celebration this year will take place in the rotunda of the Cinquantenaire, which has a striking display of work of Calvin Hunt, a Kwakiutl artist from the Canadian Pacific coast.  From the photo below, I think the mouth position demonstrated by the person represented on the totem will be a good reminder about how to properly project one's voice operatically...

It's great to be invited back: it will likely be larger in scale this year, on the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation; we expect about 500 guests.  I might also perform in Luxembourg as well during that week, but I have to leave some room in my schedule as I have to sing an audition at the Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie for its artistic director Peter de Caluwe on the 28th of June.  He hasn’t heard me audition in at least five years, so I am happy to put this on the calendar.  Fortunately my repertoire has been exercised pretty regularly this season: I've used the same aria set in Nice, Toulon, Cardiff, London, Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, and Toronto this season, so if I'm not ready to roll now, I never will be.

On Tuesday the 25th I ran from the house all the way to Maggie’s school, a distance of about 15 km... this is something that I've been wanting to do since I started trail running, and it was a little challenging, as I pretty much had to navigate off the top of my head.  For main roads Google Maps has lots of information, but I was running frequently on trails that don't appear on the map.  Fortunately many of the trails in the Sonian Forest are marked, and I made some good progress just following the one marked Waterloo voetpad (which is flemish for "footpath" - I think).

The choice of weekday is deliberate: Maggie takes a yoga class every Tuesday along with a number of her colleagues, and after my run I went and joined in; it’s amazingly effective at stretching everything out post-run, so that you aren’t as achy afterwards.  As well she does a Zumba aerobics/dance class on Wednesdays, and also does shorter runs three times a week, so she's really feeling good, and it's nice for us to have an exercise class together.

On Wednesday we met with the bank and managed to get our mortgage demands in order.  The interest rates are so incredibly low right now that our monthly payment will be comparable to our rental payments.  This is a relief, and so we are starting to look forward to moving - and renovation - day(s)...

The external view of the technical school in Boom (yes, Boom)

Thursday Malcolm played hooky from school, and the two of us drove up to the International Lutherie School of Antwerp (ILSA).  We had a look around the workshops for violin making, guitar making and restoration.

Lutherie ateliers

It seems to be a calm, cheerful, well-organised and well-run school, and Malcolm decided then and there to do a preliminary registration for guitar-building, beginning September first of this year.

signing up for lutherie

I have signed both kids up for many things over the years, but it was a little bit poignant for me to sit there and sign on the dotted line to approve his application for admission... then again, it's a normal part of growing up... for both parents and children.

4:30 am in Brussels airport departures

The following Saturday I rolled out of bed at 3:30 am, to get Malcolm to the airport for his weeklong voyage scolaire.  The graduating classes of his secondary school had a number of possible trips that week, and he was one of the lucky ones to get selected by lottery to fly to Lisbon and then to the Azores.  I tell you, these poor kids: they have to settle for trips to Rome, Switzerland, the Azores, Prague, Berlin…

That same afternoon Lawrence and I rolled out our first walking / tasting / historical tour of the downtown of Brussels.  The participants were an extended Irish family from Cork, and included one set of grandparents, several adult siblings and their spouses, one infant and three small children.  It was a challenge to have something to occupy everyone but I think we managed… there were tastings of Marcolini, Neuhaus and Blondeel chocolate, stops to see a variety of points of historical interest, and a beer midway through at the surrealist watering hole Un Fleur en Papier Doré and then again at the conclusion of the tour at A La Bécasse, which specialises in geuze, and where the servers are dressed like monks.  Lawrence and I racked up close to 11 km walking distance over the three-hour tour, and we didn't have an app to track how many words we spoke, but we were both pretty tired afterwards.  Interestingly the grandmother of this group knew my friend Clara O'Sullivan, a famous Irish soprano from Cork, with whom I sang Verdi's Un ballo in maschera back in 2008; it reminds me how much I enjoyed my time with the daoine ó corcaigh, and also I realise that Maggie and the boys haven't been to Ireland yet; we must make a visit.

Lawrence explaining the guild houses in the Grand'Place

I really welcomed the incentive to do some more research into the history of this city that I’ve lived in now for almost ten years, and learned a lot of things from listening to Lawrence’s narration.  After doing a more thorough investigation of the history of the statues in the Petit Sablon, for example, I now know a lot more that I did before about the map-maker Gerard Mecator, William of Orange (aka Guillaume le Taciturne), and about the period of Spanish occupation of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, and the rebellion of the Dukes of Egmont and van Hoorn from the rule of King Phillip II.  (There are interesting connections between this bit of Brussels history, Beethoven's Egmont overture, the Schiller play about Don Carlos, the son of Phillip, who tried to join the Flemish revolutionaries, and Verdi's opera on the same topic).  I've also learned quite a bit about the time of Leopold II, the famous (infamous) “builder king” who siphoned so much money out of the Congo and used much of it to transform the Belgian capital city.

The legacy of Belgium’s colonial past is not something that today's Belgian society has fully come to grips with, but the evidence of the money extracted is visible everywhere.  But Belgium was rich even before Leopold II came along; his father Leopold the first had enough liquid cash to start building the Palais de Justice at Place Poelaert (although to be fair, Leopold II had succeeded him by the time it was finished in 1883, so he probably got stuck with the most of the bill).

This edifice is the largest courthouse in the world, and is reputed to be the largest building constructed in the nineteenth century.  It's bigger than St. Peter's in Rome; it allegedly cost around 250 million in today's Euros.  For comparison, the total capital reserves of the national bank of Belgian at the time was around 250 million EUR.  That's a lot of waffles, don't you think?

While we were doing the walking tour Duncan was busy with his karate examinations… In case you’re interested, the basic progression of belt colours at his dojo is this:

• white
• yellow
• orange
• green
• blue
• brown
• black

These different levels are often split into smaller sections for the child/youth classes, so that in a year or half-year of instruction a child student might move from orange, to orange/green, and then next to full green, for example.  As it turns out Duncan is such a keener that he memorised two katas instead of just one, and so skipped an increment in his belt progression, moving up to a blue/brown belt.  Well done, Duncan!

now that is a hamburger

Obviously all of that kicking and punching and shouting made him hungry, so as it was the eve of his fourteenth birthday we decided to celebrate with a trip to Mahantt’n burger, on avenue Louise.  As our friends Raoul and Luisa had introduced us to that restaurant several months ago, he invited them to come with us, and a good time was had by all.

high winds on the Veersemeer

The next morning Gediminas picked Duncan and I up, and the three of us drove up to Middelburg in the Netherlands, chartered a boat, and sailed around the Veersemeer for the day.  We had quite a difficult time of it, as the wind was extremely strong, gusting at times to Beaufort 8, which qualifies as gale-force!  It was intense... we reefed the mainsail and used only a half jib, just to try to control the boat, but it was still pretty heavy going.

resting after a difficult sail to Veere

Interestingly, Duncan didn’t seem to mind the heavy wind at all: he was a great sport and helped out with releasing the jib when tacking, and we three got quite a good rhythm going.  In Veere we had the requisite maatjesharing from the dockside stand, and then sat down for frites, fried fish and deep-fried sausage (!) at the chip truck.

pickled herring with onions in Veere

But despite the all-day snacking, that evening he still had enough room in the tank for spaghetti bolognese and caesar salad on his birthday, not to mention cake...

The next week involved more guitar sanding for me and another run to St. John’s on tuesday afternoon for yoga.  This time a more easterly route took me all the way around the grounds of the Chateau de la Hulpe before curving back west to come to the school in the opposite direction from the one last week. This added a kilometre or two, as well as much more elevation, but it kept me in the forest for almost the entire run.  There were beautiful bluebells in evidence in the forest, and the bright green colour of the emerging leaves was magical.

bluebells in the Sonien forest en route to Waterloo

Wednesday we went to the real estate office to sign the official offer to buy the house in Wavre.  Unlike the other times in Canada when we bought our houses through an intermediary, and so never saw the sellers in person, in this case we walked into the realtor’s office, and promptly sat down across the table from the vendor, making small talk while the realtor left the room and prepared all of the documents!  It was a bit strange to us, but that’s how it’s done here.  The seller looks to be about our age, maybe a little older; she works at the DelHaize 50 metres down the street, doesn’t own a car, doesn’t have an email address… we are thinking that she probably grew up in that house, and inherited it from her parents, but now is selling it to buy an all-new apartment.  That is probably why the house is relatively undisturbed, with nearly all of the original fittings and doors, which we like.  We all signed and initialled on the dotted lines, and handed over our ten percent deposit.  We still have to go to the bank and sign the mortgage contract, and then the deal closes on the 17th of July; we move in one week later, on the 24th.

Of course we have lots to think about in preparing for the move.  The kitchen is less equipped with storage than our kitchen here, so I have been keeping an eye on Facebook for sale pages to get more furniture.  So far we have purchased a nice glass-fronted cabinet in dark birch hardwood from a family who is returning home to Poland, three white Ikea glass-fronted cabinets from a Bulgarian couple returning to Sofia, a solid pine and glass cabinet, and a red Poäng chair and ottoman.  As well our friend Bryan let me know about some office furniture sales that were taking place at his office in Brussels, which is closing, so we bid on and received two large desks/work tables, a tall metal bookshelf with tambour doors that would be good as a pantry or tool storage in the cellar, an armchair, and a nice walnut and aluminum under-desk file cabinet.  Fortunately we can store most of this in Bryan and Kiana’s garage until moving day.

getting ready to start the Trail des Cisterciens

Malcolm came home from the Azores with a good suntan and happy memories; we were all glad to see him home safely.  On Sunday it was the Trail des Cisterciens with Bryan, Kiana, and Lawrence.  Tiffany and Maggie stayed back at the Hammer’s house not far away, but Claire spelled them off, and Maggie had her own run in the Bousval forest.  She’s going out maybe three times a week, and is up to 20 minutes continuous running, for total distances walk/run of 6 km.  I managed my own 19km race in a little over two hours, which I counted a success given the 450m elevation gain, which was hard on the thigh muscles, and even harder on the muscles around the knees on the descending sections.

rehydrating after the Trail des Cisterciens near Bryan and Kiana's house with Claire's friend Jan

This past week was pretty uneventful.  I made a couple of trips with Bryan to the office to pick up various items of furniture sold in the auction.  I also had a couple of visits to the shop which included more guitar sanding.  On friday the ebony arrived, and I spend a couple of hours planing and truing the fingerboard, and then sawing the frets, using a metal fret-sawing mitre box made by StewMac.  

planed fingerboard

cutting the frets

the finished fretboard

It’s a relatively simple operation: one trues up both sides of the fingerboard blank, and then one edge; the blank is fixed to the template with double-sided tape, and then the jig has glides and stops so that one positions the ebony blank securely and then saws both straight and flatly into the fingerboard at the correct fret locations.  The jig is made to be used with a dozuki, a kind of thin-bladed japanese crosscut saw, and one has to wax the blade and reposition the jig between each cut.  It’s time-consuming, which is why many builders order their fingerboards pre-cut, but as my Zadowcaster will have the same nut spacing (i.e. the distance between the strings at the headstock) as my 1934 resonator guitar Ophelia, and like “her”, have a flat and not a radiused fingerboard, it’s a customisation that requires my individual attention. Malcolm has some more lacquering and sanding to do on his guitar body before we’re ready to spray the cherry colour on both guitars at the same time. When the truss rods arrive we’ll start work on the maple necks; these will have the truss rods and then fingerboards attached before they are shaped on the bandsaw, then rasped and sanded to the correct profile.

Yesterday was the 14th of May: Mother’s Day.  Maggie received some very nice flowers from the boys, from our favourite florist up the street. It was also the 18th birthday of Malcolm which seems to me to have crept up on us rather suddenly; the last couple of years in particular have gone very quickly.  It's a big day for parents when your kid turns eighteen.  He worked in the morning, helping Benoit plane some spruce and cedar planking that will be used in harp guitars while Maggie and Duncan and I were at church.  Then in the evening we had Benoit and his partner Sophie and her son Matteo over for steak frites and salad, and of course a delicious chocolate orange cake with mascarpone icing that Maggie made...

Today there has been some tidying up after the party, and lots of planning and telephone calling and reading through scores.  Tomorrow I hope to run to Waterloo again and do yoga; Wednesday we sign the mortgage at the bank; Thursday I take Malcolm out of school in the afternoon to visit another guitar-building school not far from the first one, which offers a slightly different curriculum, more toward modern instruments and arch-top guitars.  Friday we head down to Florenville for my second time running the Trail des Trappistes, this time 19km.  We’re camping with the whole gang again, and I hope the weather will cooperate… let's see if I can't better my time from last year...

Happy Easter

It’s been a very busy two weeks of Easter holidays, and this morning the house is suddenly silent again… so time to catch up.

We got an early start on the vacation on Thursday evening prior to the last day of school, by going out to dinner as part of the Tram Experience with Lawrence and Tiffany.  This is a multiple-course dinner served on a converted vintage tram car that picks you up at the big courthouse on Rue Royale, takes you for a tour of the city while you dine, and then delivers you back there again after a couple of hours.  We'd been wanting to do it for a long time but were lucky to have the schedules meet up, and it was very good.

As well the last week before Easter vacation marked the "one hundred days" left of school for the last-year secondary students, and their tradition includes going to school in disguise.  Malcolm made sure to participate...

Early in the first week of vacation Maggie and I went to Namur to check out the fabric expo held there each year, and she purchased many different fabrics for projects.

She has already made three dresses and a t-shirt on this holiday, and cut out two more outfits.

We also bought some new fabric to cover the dining room chairs, and I went to the Brico to get new veneer core plywood for the seats themselves, to replace the very cheap low density fibreboard pieces originally used.  Afterwards we also made a trip to the historical water mill in Hollange, which is maybe 150 km straight southeast in the direction of Luxembourg City.

A water mill has been operating in this location for almost six centuries; as recently as 1900 there were still 430 water mills in Luxembourg, but today the mill at Hollange is one of the last still running.  It’s quite an amazing structure, with the machinery almost entirely made of wood, and they produce four types of flour.

We have got into the habit of making two loaves of bread every few days, and I find a mixture of 25% spelt flour and 75% wheat makes a pleasant bread that keeps well.

Malcolm and I went wood shopping on the first Monday of the vacation with our friend Benoit the luthier, and assembled some of the components for our matched guitars project.  The bodies will be made from the same plank of basswood, and the necks carved from the same plank of maple.  The next day we did some cutting and planing of the wood to thickness, and it was great to see the grain and the guitar shapes start to emerge.

Malcolm will be playing a few songs with two other students in his year at the Fête de l’École, so he got in some band practice early that first week, while Duncan spent quite a bit of time with his friends from karate.  Near the end of the week, we dog-sat Samosa, our "god-dog" while Kiana took the kids to the Hague for an overnight while Bryan was travelling for work, and I enjoyed taking him out for a fast 10km in the Forest.  He also got in a six-km walk/run with Maggie, and multiple walks with Duncan too.

On Friday we all attended the inaugural acoustic string jam session, held at St. Andrew’s church.  There has been a folk music night held there infrequently for many years but this event has a slightly different flavour, as it seems to me to be dominated by bluegrass musicians.

A family from the USA have recently joined the congregation, and their two sons are mandolin and banjo players, and very active in the bluegrass scene here in Belgium, so they had the idea to start up a jam session again at the church, and brought along a number of their friends.  Malcolm rehearses with the brothers regularly, and there were no other bass players there, so he was busy comping along to jigs and reels on electric bass all night amid a sea of banjos...

Saturday I went on a nice long training run with Lawrence; it was meant to be maybe 18km, but ended up being twenty, my longest run since hurting my ankle last September!  Lawrence is getting ready for a 35 km run in Bouillon next weekend, so he needs the longer distances… I’m really happy with how things are going in this hobby, and I’m seeing some good progress on my short run speed as well as slowly increasing distance.

On Palm Sunday the choir director was absent, and the usual organist was away as well, so the music committee had asked me to sing something in the anthem slot… without an accompanist at hand I decided to do something on guitar that involved the support of the two boys, so Duncan played percussion, and Malcolm assisted on guitar while we sang a trio version of a Bruce Cockburn song that I had tweaked with an additional verse of lyrics to help it fit the Palm Sunday theme.

It was a big hit, and I am happy that Duncan in particular got back to singing again; since his voice has started to get deeper he has stopped singing with the junior choir, so this was his debut performance as a baritone, and the first time all three of us sang together in public.  Many people in the congregation asked why Maggie didn’t join in also… Perhaps that's another project for the future.

In the afternoon we went over to the Varvuolis household to let Simonas and Malcolm play some loud music in the basement while Gediminas and I went for a short run and then joined them.  As well Simonas was celebrating his eighteenth birthday, and he was presented with a Toronto Raptors jersey that I had brought back from Canada.  Jonas Valančiūnas is an important player on this team, and of course, he’s Lithuanian!

Maggie has also started running, as I indicated earlier; she usually goes with Julia Gardner, and has been slowly increasing her distance.  She got out about three times a week during the two weeks of vacation and along with weekly classes of Yoga and Zumba is feeling much more energetic, and is slimming down quite a bit too.  I've gone out with her a couple of times too, and we recently visited the monument built in the Foret de Soignes, behind the old Hippodrome de Boitsfort, to commemorate the thirty-two people killed in the Brussels attacks of last March 22nd.

It's a peaceful and quiet location, with thirty-two blue stones arranged in a circle, with a paper birch tree for each victim planted in a larger circle enclosing the stones.

Mid-week we went out to Bryan and Kiana’s to borrow some power tools to cut out those dining room chair seats, and Bryan and I got in a fast 8km run together.  Then Maggie I continued our road trip, and went to look at a number of houses for sale a little to the south-east of where we live.  We’ve been hemming and hawing about what to do with the proceeds of our Toronto house sale from several years ago, and had looked a quite a few Brussels houses over the last few months.  Unfortunately the real estate market in the capital region is highly inflated, and while we loved one of the houses in our current neighbourhood, it wasn’t really in our price range, so we were looking out a bit towards Waterloo to be close to her work, but still close to the city.

After seeing three houses, and making appointments to visit more, we headed home.  That evening I took advantage of a colleague’s complimentary ticket offer, and drove up to Ghent on my own to see a performance of the Bach St. Matthew Passion.

Over the last several years I’ve performed the St. Matthew ten times and the St. John three, and last year I had to turn down three or four performances as my schedule was too full.  But this spring, I had no Passions to sing at all!  But it was still very interesting to experience Bach’s masterwork from the audience point of view.  I knew the orchestra members, and many of them greeted me warmly; I was happy for my colleagues (I had sung as a soloist with all but one of them in other projects) and also was glad to meet and renew acquaintance with several conductors from Flanders who were there.  I hope that next spring will see a resurgence of contracts to sing more contracts during Passion season.

The rest of the week was taken up with medical/dental appointments, more house viewings, and social engagements.  Of course we did the usual family cooking; a few high spots over the holidays were pan-seared seared scallops in a sauternes reduction with capellini, a truly epic club-sandwich, maple-bourbon-mint ribs, and also homemade hot cross buns on Good Friday morning...

One of the houses that we saw in Wavre reminded us a lot of both our Toronto house and our Sharbot Lake house, in that it had good light, was largely intact with original fittings, and hadn't been monkeyed with too much, and had a large garage and a garden, and so after some deliberation we put in an offer to purchase, and after some negotiation it was accepted.  Here are some photos...

More news as it develops, but it seems that if all goes well we should be moving in by late July.  The house is serviceable and has a lot of good amenities; we want to do some work on it, to insulate and replace the roof, and most probably renovate the quite large attic space to make it into one or two rooms, and do something with the bathroom upstairs.

The Saturday of Easter weekend started with some guitar building in the morning, followed by an afternoon run in the Bousval Forest.

Then we went to the neighbours of the Hammers, Jean-Claude and Mischou, for an Easter Egg hunt for the children.

It was followed by a wonderful big dinner, with many delicious courses and of course many nice wines, and some caviar and vodka.  I guess caviar qualifies as eggs for Easter dinner?

We didn’t stay over, but came home and got up in time for the Sunday morning service.  Then in the afternoon Lawrence Edwards and I did an exploratory dry run for a walking tour of the Brussels downtown, starting at the Mont des Arts, then passing down into the Jardin du Petit Sablon, the Notre Dame du Sablon church and square, and from there down eventually past the Manneken Pis (and the new museum that houses his many costumes, pictured below), the Grand’Place, Place de la Bourse and so on.

In two weeks we’ll take a dozen people for on this route, and encourage them to sample artisanal chocolates, cookies, and rare beers from the establishments along the route, while taking in the sights, and getting to know some local lore.

Lawrence is quite well-informed about the history of that part of the Brussels, but I have some contributions to make from the memory bank as well, so we are looking forward to it.

We invited Lawrence and Tiffany and their kids over for a raclette dinner afterwards.  Malcolm regularly babysits their three kids, but he was out with friends for a birthday party instead, and Duncan was good enough to pay attention to their kids while the adults were dining.  Still we were all pretty tired and ended up making it a relatively early night.

Easter Monday was fairly quiet: Duncan was catching up on his reading and breaking down and rebuilding his many LEGO sets, and Malcolm was finishing up the last touches on his big latin essay that he’s been writing during the holiday.  Maggie wrapped up her current sewing project in progress until her next chunk of free time, and got her stuff together for the first day of school.

I was occupied most of the day Sunday in rehearsing for this weekend’s Bach concert… it’s a fill-in for me, as the original bass singer backed out of the project a couple of weeks ago.  It’s quite a challenging programme, very rangy (i.e. high and low), and one of the three cantatas (BWV 158: “Der Friede sei mit dir”) is essentially a solo cantata for bass, with some help from soprano chorus, and a final four-part chorale.  I spent a couple of hours working on it by myself yesterday afternoon, and then sang through all three cantatas with the cellist for two hours, followed by more rehearsing in the later evening, near the end of orchestral rehearsal.  So all in all it was a good long day of singing, and I was pretty worn out.

This week will involve more rehearsing, and I have to deal with a number of things for the house in Wavre.  I have to secure a notary to help us process the offer of sale and eventually the final sale transaction, and then we have to talk to a few bankers and try to get them to compete to give us the best interest rate… lots of phone calls and meetings in the forecast!

Canada Audition Tour

I have kept a handwritten journal intermittently as far back as 1990, and have done so continuously since my first trip to Europe in 2004. It’s illuminating to look over my thoughts from past years, but there are good reasons to write as a contemplative practice, taking an opportunity for reflection, the externalisation and clarification of one’s thoughts, “venting” negative emotions, and so forth.  As well, there is an satisfying feeling that comes in the simple discipline of actively improving one’s clarity of expression, and even one's handwriting through practice.

Speaking of discipline, there is also a motivational benefit that accompanies writing down one’s intentions and plans and prioritisations… I have found that I am much more likely to make those phone calls, rehearse those arias, and run those training runs if I have added those plans to my notebook, almost as if I have told my plans to another person.

My blog posts serve much the same purpose.  It reveals much about the state of my recent schedule that I have had neither the time to make a journal entry nor a blog post since leaving for Canada on the 15th of February!  But now that I’m home in Brussels and on my own again, I have time and space to summarise the events of the last month…

Quinte Curling Club

After arriving in Toronto, I made a quick trip to Belleville to see my parents, and watched the end of their curling game.  There were a great many of their friends there whom I hadn’t seen in almost thirty years, so it was nice to shake hands and share a beer with the players when they were off the ice.  After a lunch together and a nice visit, it was back to Toronto for me to sing the rehearsal and performance with Jurgen Petrenko and the Toronto Classical Singers of the Rossini Petite Messe Solennelle, with a team of soloists that I had worked with before.

It’s always nice to catch up with the extended musical family!  The concert was the third project I have done with Jurgen; it went very well, and I do hope that we work together again in the future.

I had very little time to hang around in Toronto, although I managed a brief visit for lunch with Eric Wilding and his two daughters.

Eric, Lily, and Hope

Kareena was unfortunately at work so I missed seeing her; I wanted to thank her for thinking of me, and purchasing for me one of the last hand-painted signs from Honest Ed’s Grocery, a Toronto landmark that finally closed at the end of last year.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/12/31/a-souvenir-from-honest-eds-the-only-place-like-it-anyplace-keenan.html

I hope her choice of sign isn’t a comment on my acting ability!

Ham

I also managed to squeeze in a brief dinner visit after the Sunday afternoon concert with Ronda and Adrian Franco and their daughter Amelia.  Adrian cooked a fantastic leg of lamb and we caught up a little... it was great to see them as always.

Adrian with the leg of lamb

The next week began with a flight out to Victoria to meet Bruce and the cast of Die Zauberflöte.  I only had a day free in Victoria on Tuesday, but managed to get in my fastest ever 5km run, with an average pace of 4:55 per km, followed by another 7km at a more easy pace.  It's pretty flat there, and I couldn't find any place where there was dirt, but ran straight east to Willows Beach on Oak Bay, and then south and around the penisula to Terry Fox monument at the western end of the Trans-Canada Highway.

fastest 5K


at "mile zero" of the Trans-Canada in Victoria, saying hello to Terry Fox

The next day I flew to Calgary to sing an audition with Taras Kulich, the new artistic head of the Calgary Opera.  It was a great opportunity while in town to visit with my cousin Thom Pardoe, his wife Krista, and their two youngest daughters, and to stay at their beautiful home.  

Cousin Thom and daughters

Thom works at the Telus Spark centre, which he described as a kind of science discovery centre.  There was a temporary exhibition of a ton of Star Trek memorabilia including real props and costumes from the various television series and movies.  It was closed by the time my audition had finished but Thom gave me a private tour!

Make it so!

Afterwards we had a lovely dinner together and had lots of fun goofing around with the girls, and with Thom, Krista, and Krista’s mom.

Thom wielding the snow brush

But it was all too short a visit: the next morning Thom gave me a lift to the airport, and I flew to Edmonton to sing for Tim Yakimec and the Edmonton opera.  One aspect of Edmonton that horrified me was the lack of public transportation: the airport in Edmonton for example might as well be in another city altogether, as it is about 30km away from City Hall, and about 50 km away from the opera; the only bus travels once every two hours, and there is no train at all; the cab ride into town costs 150 CAD return.  It’s unfortunately the only game in town.  I realised then how lucky I had been in Victoria to have the hotel shuttle, and in Calgary to have Thom pick me up.  Vancouver has its sky train, which I would use the next week, and in Toronto one can use the subway/Kipling bus to get to Pearson, or choose the Island Airport as I did, with a shuttle bus to Union Station.

propeller travel

That audition went quite well also... afterwards I flew immediately back to Calgary and then to Victoria, where the next day I sang my third audition in three days, this time for Timothy Vernon.  I was very happy with how all three auditions went, and then was able to relax for a bit, enjoying a nice Cohiba cigar with Bruce on the quay.

a cigar on the pier

The next day was more health-orientated, and included a 10,5 km trail run on Saturday (on genuine dirt trails, around Beaver Lake in Saanich) with conductor Joey Petraroia, prior to the closing performance of Die Zauberflöte on Sunday.

a trail run with Joey

Before the opera I managed a brief visit with the luthier Scot Tremblay, a Victoria-based builder who focusses on 19th-century guitars.  My friend Benoit Meule-Stef of Brussels (a harp guitar builder who has been mentoring Malcolm in guitar construction recently) suggested that I look him up, and we had a great little visit.  He has some lovely Aussie Shepherd / Border Collie dogs, and a well-organised shop that was a pleasure to see.  His guitars are beautiful, and can be seen here:
http://scottremblayguitars.com/

I hope that we'll get together the next time he pops over to Brussels.

Victoria luthier Scot Tremblay

Then I was off to the opera.  Bruce sang particularly well and the cast was uniformly excellent.  Interestingly Alexander Neef of the Canadian Opera Company was on hand, and I had a chance to speak with him.  He agreed to having me audition for the COC when we can find an opportunity, so that is encouraging… scheduling it will be harder than it sounds, however, but I might be able to catch him when he is next in Europe.

reunion with David

On Monday I headed to Vancouver, where I met my very old friend David Cunningham (a.k.a. Lazarus Brown from the Moses Gillespie Redemption), and spent the afternoon with him and his class of English-as-a-second-language students, visiting from Japan.  

Then we went home to see his wife Greta and their son Eoin.

Eoin is a wonderful two-year-old, very talkative, sociable, and physically strong and healthy, busy with his toys, asking many questions and very interested in books.  We got along beautifully, and I am very happy to see their little family doing so well.  It’s hard to stay in touch because of the long distances and time difference involved, but I am going to try to make more of an effort to stay more connected via facetime/skype with the three of them.  David had a very close relationship with our boys when they were very young and so I was thrilled to have similar moments of connection with their beautiful son...

Bruce was originally planning to return to Toronto and his teaching job in Kingston immediately following the final Pacific Opera Victoria performance on Sunday, but he received some news while in Victoria that he was needed to participate in a concert workshop of a new chamber opera that is being developed, on the topic of the “disappeared” native women who have vanished along the “Highway of Tears” in British Columbia.  The name of this new production is Missing, and it is currently still in the compositional stage, but the composer Brian Current and librettist Marie Clements did have enough material ready to present a sampling of it for audiences in Vancouver.  I knew a number of the singers tasked with bringing this new work to life, and so it was nice to see them again, and I look forward to hearing more about this production as it unfolds later on in 2017.  More information is available here: http://www.pov.bc.ca/missing.html

The next day while David and Greta were at work and Eoin in daycare I ran around the Vancouver seawall that surrounds Stanley Park, and then continued my run within the interior of the park, and then along the downtown streets that led to David’s workplace, before heading home for some family time.  Vancouver is a stunning place and I love the way the air smells: a beautiful combination of cedar smoke and clean iodic ocean water...

Then the next day started quietly, and I rested up for my audition for Opera Vancouver in the early afternoon.  It went very well, much as the previous three had done.  Fortunately David and Greta and Eoin live a short walk from the opera so it was an easy thing to get to the opera’s rehearsal hall/offices and back again.  After the audition I packed up my things and met David and Bruce at the performance of the Missing opera, at the Carnegie Native Education Centre at Hastings and Main on Vancouver’s downtown east side.  This beautiful old building was built in 1903 as a public library, but now serves as a community centre for the high risk populations that live there.

the staircase of the Carnegie Centre Vancouver

Hastings and Main is a pretty grotty area… it was quite unnerving to see the obvious signs of drug and alcohol abuse among the people milling about the neighbourhood.  The whole atmosphere reminded me a little of the chaotic outdoor street markets in some of the Chinese cities I visited while on tour there, with clothing and junk and broken people scattered around, like a permanent flea market, or something out of Blade Runner, or a Terry Gilliam film set.  It’s really tragic.

One of the cast members from the Missing opera was also singing with the Vancouver Symphony during the same period, so they had put her up at a very posh hotel a short distance away; to celebrate and unwind a bit following the very intense performance we met there for a drink and nibblies, but the contrast between this high-class hotel and the desolate conditions at street level at Hastings and Main was stark.

After a short visit with the other singers, it was back to the hotel near the airport to pack up and get ready for our departure the next morning.

The airport shuttle took us to the airport without incident, and we flew back to Toronto.  We unpacked, did laundry, and decompressed a little over dinner and cigars, and enjoyed a nice fire in the wood stove.  As well we managed to attend the memorial service for Stuart Hamilton, the late pianist, musician, conductor, opera coach, and radio personality, held on Sunday in the Jane Mallet Theatre at the St. Lawrence Centre downtown.  Stuart was a fixture on the Canadian opera scene, and had given Bruce many early performance opportunities.  He had also been the narrator at some of my first operatic performances, and I had appreciated his encouragement.

It was a moving and funny memorial, filled with many photographs, witty stories compiled from Stuart’s memoirs, and a few recordings of his piano performances, songs, and his many spoken word appearances.  Everyone who was anyone in the Toronto music scene was there, and it was amazing to see so many old friends and colleagues all in one place.

We got into the car on the following Monday morning and made our way to Kingston where Bruce resumed his teaching duties at Queen’s University.  I was lucky to get in a couple of visits with family in the Kingston area: first was an afternoon cup of tea with my cousin David, who is enjoying continuing acting opportunities in live theatre, cinema, and spoken word acting.  I also got in a great visit with his sister Christine, and we enjoyed an afternoon tasting of some Belgian beer, opened courtesy of her latest acquisition, a Hard Rock Café Nice bottle opener that a certain cousin *ahem* bought for her while he was auditioning in the south of France…

I was very happy during my brief stay in Kingston to also have dinner with Bruce, Dina Namer, and our mutual friends Gill Fisher and Mary-Liz Best.  Gill invited us all in for a bang-up meal (I wish I had her touch with meat-pie pastry) and a charming evening of conversation.  As well I had lunch the next day with Dina and Bruce and an old friend, the pianist Ireneus Zuk, the deputy head, and got caught up on all the news happening at new (Aubrey) Dan School of Music and Drama.

I also took the opportunity to have a great run on the trails at the Little Cataraqui Conservation Area.  Dirt at last!  Actually, it wasn’t all dirt: much of the trail was still covered with ice, as the different loops are used for cross-country skiing for most of the winter, and so I had to skitter like Bambi across many sections that were still covered, but it was still a fun time.

Then it was off to Ottawa to spend an overnight with Hugh and Sheila; Maggie visited them for a week in October, but I hadn’t seen them for over a year.  We had a nice lunch and afternoon together, catching up on everyone’s news, and even managed to have a facetime call with Maggie and the boys in Brussels via Hugh’s iPad.  Then I went for a short run on the snowpacked trails around the Rideau Canal (not something I would advise; my shins got scratched by the icy crust on the snowpack) before we went out that evening.  They treated me to a lovely pizza quattro stagione at their favourite local restaurant before heading home.  Our time together lasted until early afternoon the next day, when I left for Kingston to pick up Bruce and continue on to Toronto.

401 sunset

My final few days in Toronto were capped off with a final audition of the tour, this time with Leslie Dala, a frequent conductor of Vancouver Opera and the director of the Vancouver Bach Choir.  He proved to be a very nice fellow and we sang through quite a bit of my repertoire from both opera and oratorio before having dinner together.  He had already made plans to stay at Bruce’s house while in town to conduct the Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School opera production, and moved in the day before I was to leave, so it was very relaxed and we talked a lot about art and opera together.  Because of his moving-in day, I had already packed everything up into my suitcases before he arrived, and so my last day or two in Toronto were very calm and stress-free, and I could just relax and spend the time with him and with Bruce.

The flight home left from the Billy Bishop airport for Montreal, and then I had a single stop-over before landing early monday morning in Brussels.  Fortunately I didn’t need to collect and re-check my bags, or pass security a second time… I had been a little bit nervous about this return flight as I was taking Ophelia, my 1934 M-14 “Leader” Regal Dobro guitar with me as carry-on.  As it happened there was no problem at all.  I loved seeing the x-ray of the resonator as it passed through the scanners, and Ophelia made it home to Brussels safe and sound… now if I can only pry it out of my son's hands...

Primus playing Ophelia in Ben's Guitar Repair Shop