Wow, it's been almost a month since my last blog post! I've been totally involved in other things, and while I've used my blog at times for reviewing priorities and planning I've been doing that other ways. There have been lots of household things to do, choosing and installing light fixtures, building and installing some cabinets, and so on. With the good weather I've been doing quite a bit of container gardening.
So what else has been going on? To sum up, it's been: performances, parties and practices. To begin with performances, the Matthias Goerne / Pierre-Laurent Aimard concert I mentioned in the last post was really very good; Goerne has the
chutzpah to bend and stretch his vocal line at will, and his
legato passages - expecially when he sings
mezza voce - were tremendously affecting. It was obvious why this fellow is so renowned as a lieder interpreter, and while I begin the cycle from a different musical/emotional place, there is lots to consider in his approach.
Next was the first of many little parties. We took an afternoon trip to Lille, just over the border into France, and celebrated Malcolm's birthday with a lunch on the grand place there. It was a four-day weekend, since it was Ascension, so we decided to delay his public birthday celebrations until the following weekend. In the intervening week, I had my first session with a boys' choir in Waterloo, and will be an occasional
répétiteur for them, giving some performance help from a vocal soloist's perspective. I also continued with my private voice student, and we made some good progress together.
Then we celebrated Malcolm's birthday with a trip to the climbing gym Terres Neuves, which was really great. Malcolm, his invited guests, his brother, and even I gave it a try, and liked it very much. Our friends Nathalie and Tschi-tschi climb every summer with their kids, and maybe we'll get a chance to go with them sometime soon.
The following week was performances; it started with the
BL!NDMAN: Globus show in Amsterdam, which went very well despite a very short rehearsal period, and ended with the
spectacle des enfants at the
maison communale. Both boys did very well in their performance pieces; Duncan as a storyteller in
Emilie Jolie, and Malcolm in a gymnastic demonstration to the music of the Black-Eyed Peas.
Finally this last weekend was very busy. Duncan's circus arts class had their end-of-year performance on Friday afternoon, and then we headed to a Canadian friend's place for a barbeque on their back patio in the gorgeous weather. Imagine my great surprise when in the course of our conversation our hosts casually happened to mention that they had a half-case of Westvleteren! I just about fell off my chair, since this is the last of the seven Trappist beers that I had yet to sample. Just for review, they are:
- Westmalle
- Westvleteren
- Orval
- Aachel
- Chimay
- Rochefort
- La Trappe
Our hosts had all three types and so the four of us shared three bottles around. The favorite seemed to be the double 8, very chocolatey with a complex aroma, but the blond and the trippel 12 were also excellent. This surprise was all the more exciting because of the relative unavailability of these beers: you have to call ahead to ask to reserve the beer, and then drive to the abbey in Vleteren (about two hours away) to pick it up. You have to specify your vehicle licence number, and sign a declaration that you won't resell the beer to anyone else. I was happy to have finally added this beer to my collection!
Our weekend continued with more performances: we left the kids with a babysitter, and drove up to Rotterdam to have dinner and then see several Canadians colleagues perform with the Rotterdam Philharmonic. Montreal's brilliant young conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin is music director of this orchestra, and Nathalie Paulin and Brett Polegato sang the roles of the parents in Debussy's
L'enfant Prodigue, while Dutch mezzo-soprano Cora Burggraaf performed Poulenc's
La voix humaine. We also met one Canadian musician who began his professional career with the Kingston Symphony, and his wife, a Montrealer; they moved to Rotterdam some years ago and are both longtime members of the Rotterdam Phil.
Yesterday I went to Amsterdam to catch the last in a series of Cole Porter recitals to mark the completion of a five-cd boxset that my friend and colleague Wilfried Van den Brande has just finished recording with Dirk Baert and the Nürnberg Symphony. Wilfried was the bass soloist in the St. John Passion we just did this past April, and it was interesting to hear him sing something completely different from the Bach role of Jesus. This music as Dirk and Wilfried presented it revealed Cole Porter's real connection with both the romantic
lied of Schubert and Schumann and the modern art of the early twentieth century, and I made note of my favorite ones to look at again later.
Now it's the home stretch before coming back to Canada. Practice is the key word for the rest of this month... First it's conversational German this afternoon with the parent of one of the kids' classmates, and Maggie is giving daily English lessons to Michel, our landlord, to help him prepare for a trip to Papua New Guinea next month. I have to continue polishing my arias for next monday's Cologne audition, and begin rehearsing for the next couple of concerts coming up in August and October. Bruce arrives in three weeks and we hope to get to Paris to see his teacher prior to our leaving for Canada on the 29th of June, so there are alarmingly few days left to get things done.
A bientot!
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