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!

Guys and Dolls

 

It's been a very busy four months since we started auditioning students for Guys and Dolls, and all of that work is coming to fruition tomorrow night when our show opens.  It's entirely cast with Middle Schoolers (Grades 6, 7, and 8) and nearly every one of the 16 or so roles is double-cast, so we have two different casts on alternate nights until we close on Saturday afternoon.

If you haven't seen it already here are some trailers on Instagram.  You don't need to be an Instagram subscriber to watch them....

Trailer 1

Trailer 2

If you are an Instagram subscriber please like and follow the our Sports and Performing Arts Instagram account for updates: 

Since last I posted I had a couple more concerts: an Easter Sunday Mass at the Antwerp Cathedral, and then a Passion concert of all Bach music in Bruges.

 

The last couple of concerts for me before the season closes include the St. Matthew Passion in Brussels on June 7th, followed by the Mozart Requiem in Den Hoorn NL on June 14th.

I have to conduct a performance of the St. John's Choir this Sunday, the day after Guys and Dolls closes, and also set up and perform with my grade nine and ten music classes in their respective rock bands.  Sunday is the St. John's Family Day so it's always good to show the community that, in addition to our musical theatre shows, we also perform other kinds of music.

June 20th is our Classical Recital with an extended choral programme, as well as solo performances from instrumental musicians and private singing students.  I have four of my students performing the Beethoven "Mir ist so wunderbar" quartet from the opera Fidelio, and there are other solos still being prepared.

Finally we have a big blowout on the last monday night of classes, the 23rd of June: our Rock Extravaganza!

You can tell that we're definitely in Belgium and not in Canada, because my big music classroom is turned into a nightclub.  I build a stage, we put up lighting, cafe tables with candles, and set up a cash bar!  It's going to be a great time, and the kids get to rock out.  My grade ten class in particular is excited, because this is the last year that I teach them music; we don't currently offer music as a grade 11/12 class.

I've been teaching at St. John's now for five years, and I've had most of them as students since that first year when they were in grade six.  It's going to be pretty emotional!  This is I think our third or fourth Rock Extravaganza since we resumed doing them, and we also expect to have some grade 11 and 12 self-organised bands, as well as some alumni returning to play, which gives a great sense of musical community and continuity.

Until next time... 

Easter Holidays

It's been quite a busy time since last I posted, with lots of professional and personal news... 

Malcolm made it back from his trip to the USA, with lots of energy and new ideas.  He was eager to get building again, and has spent a lot of time reorganising his shop space and planning for future projects.  He's already started on a new experimental archtop project, and has enjoyed meeting up with old friends and colleagues again.

Duncan is enjoying his one shift a week at the University bar near the Cimietière d'Ixelles, not far from our former home in Watermael-Boitsfort, and planning to finish his Bachelor's degree this spring, and will continue with a Master's degree starting in September.

Maggie and I had a great time in Prague with our colleague Ben.  It's really a very open and friendly city with a lot of good restaurants, and cultural attractions.  We didn't manage to see any concerts as our days were too full with training sessions to have enough time, but did eat at some amazing restaurants, and got in a visit to the newly renovated Mucha Museum.

I've had four concert performances of my own since mid-Feburary, starting with a fun performance of an unpublished duet for two bass singers, with the Belgian Viola d'Amore Association.  This instrument, chiefly used in the baroque period, has admirers in the early music field, and many fans in Belgium and the Netherlands.  This is the third project I do with this group, and they are all very warm and enthusiastic musicians and great colleagues, whom I respect very much.

After that concert I had a cluster of three performances of Brahms' German Requiem in the last ten days, conducted by Anthony Vigneron, with the Choir of the Brussels-Wallonie Federation.  I had sung with Anthony several times before, and was very happy to perform in this amazing piece again.  The choir was excellent and it was a very emotional project.

Squeezed in amongst these performances were rehearsals for the Bach Matthäuspassion ahead of the performance in Brussels in June.  This is significant for me, as the conductor has asked me to bring along a small ripieno choir (this literally means "padding" but in this case it means "additional reinforcements") of eight boy sopranos, which we can find among our St. John's choir singers, to sing in the first and last numbers of the first half of the Passion.

Speaking of St. John's Choir, it's been one big success after another, with our own projects, as well as the Association for Music in International Schools (AMIS) festivals... We had an honor choir festival in London in October, for middle school girls (Maggie and I accompanied six of them), followed by the High School honor choir in Warsaw with two sopranos and a baritone chosen by external audition for the select choir that happened in March.

Then during the first weekend of April I took nine middle school boys to an AMIS honor choir festival in Brussels.  The middle school cleaned up in the soloist auditions: of the six middle school girls, two had solos, and for the middle school boys, six out of the nine auditioned successfully for solos!  I'm super proud of these young singers.

As well, in the middle of these events (not to mention our academic schedule, and the rehearsals for Guys and Dolls) I was invited to take a small select choir to the Irish Embassy in Brussels, for the launch of 2025's "Darkness into Light" suicide prevention initiative.  This is something that started in Ireland, but now has become an international movement, and in Belgium it has partnered with the Community Health Services (CHS) counselling service.  British singer Melissa James had agreed to have the organisation use her song for the launch, and we received an arrangement of it the weekend before the concert.  But the kids learned it quickly, and Malcolm and I backed them up on archtop guitar (one that he built) and contrabass (his debut playing with a bow).  It went very well and the audience was very emotional and appreciative.

I feel really excited to give our student singers a taste of the professional world, where you sometimes have to learn arrangements quickly, and travel to an unfamiliar location with an unfamiliar audience, and deliver a good performance.  Here's a video...

Today all four of us are at home for the first time since last September, which is great, and we're enjoying a nice family meal of homemade pesto pasta with potatoes and green beans, and traditional Ligurian (Genoa is the capital of that Italian province) dish that I've never tried before.  It worked out really well!

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/6078-pasta-green-beans-and-potatoes-with-pesto

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Wednesday, April 16th

Monday evening after I started writing this blog post I went up to Antwerp Cathedral, to rehearse for an Easter Sunday concert with a ton of different music.  Peter Van de Velde is the organist there and this is the third or fourth project that I've sung with him.  Most of the music is two-on-a-part singing with a few solos, but all of the singers are soloists, and so it's quite exciting, and it's nice to stay sharp with learning new and unfamiliar music at short notice, not to mention it doesn't hurt that it pays well.

Malcolm has a couple of new developments: an archtop commission that just came in, as well as a lot of repair and setup work.  As well he may be moving his shop, or at least a portion of it, to a place in Brussels that is the new home of an artistic and artisanal music collective / concert venue / recording studio, in Anderlecht.

At the halfway point of Holy Week, we are sending you good wishes for a pleasant and happy Easter, and if you're celebrating Passover, Chag Sameach!