Choir boot camp

Actually, I think “boot camp” only refers to intensive training for new recruits, and this weekend is intensive training for the whole choir. I left a bit early today because I wasn’t feeling very well, and anyway I wasn’t staying overnight so I wanted to get home before it got too late – so here I am, dutifully producing another PeBloWriMo post. Of the things we are rehearsing now, I don’t like the Britten piece, God’s Grandeur: I can only manage to sing about half of it because the rest of the alto part is too high, but apart from that it’s just not the kind of polyphony I like to listen to or perform. Apart from that the current play list meets with my approval: Three Songs from Shakespeare by Vaughan Williams is fun and I think it’ll be quite good once we’ve learnt it properly, Rheinberger’s Cantus Missae is a piece I’ve sung several times over the last ten years and I like it immensely, and we’ll sing some early music as well. Oh, and we are rehearsing Händel’s St John’s Passion – yes, Händel’s, and no, we didn’t know it existed, either. The 2nd altos get to sing 1st tenor which is wonderful. I’m not going to be here over Easter however, so won’t get to perform it, but it’s fun enough to rehearse.

So right now the other choirists are partying and I have just had some Jansson’s Temptation and predict some DVD watching in the near future. And an earlyish bed. Hopefully I’ll be well enough to go back for the second day of choir boot camp, tomorrow.

I spent the weekend singing, mostly. The choir travelled out in the semi-countryside on the outskirts of town, and practiced Rheinberger, Back, the Christmas programme and the hymns for the CD we’re about to record, until we were basically blue in the face (and not only because the house was cold). It was fun, though. I needed to get away from thinking only about the thesis, and managed to keep the computer in its bag the entire time. The Rheinberger we sing is his Cantus Missae, which we’ll sing on the All Hallows weekend; I know I’ve sung it before, probably nine or ten years ago. Beautiful music anyway, and fun to sing. Bach’s Christmas Oratory is also fun. It has been performed in Uppsala Cathedral on the first Sunday in Advent for years and years. This choir has performed it once, two years ago; then we started preparing much too late due to a rather pressed schedule earlier in the term, although I think it went well in the end (I caught a cold that weekend, two years ago, and rehearsed in the morning of the performance but had to go home after – and missed all concerts in December, always a heavy month for singing. (This year we have four concerts in December, I think, and three at the end of November, including the Christmas Oratory.)

So that was not particularly interesting to anybody except myself, I guess – be grateful I don’t start talking about the thesis. I just might, though I should really be writing it, not about it.

And tomorrow the cats have an appointment with the vet, to have their teeth cleaned from tartar. Poor fluffballs have no idea what’s in store.

We spent last weekend in Helsinki, celebrating the wedding of Eemeli and Saijaa, two friends of ours from the Finnish science fiction fandom. Wedding parties are always fun; this one included the opportunity to come up with names for the twins who are expected in May, as well as the Finnish tradition (which I didn’t know before) of the bride being abducted and the groom having to perform and do various tricks until he has collected enough money from the wedding guests to buy his new wife back. (Eemeli can juggle pretty well, even with eggs. He cannot sing, however.)

One of the best parts was the performance by three of the four members of the folk music group Inehmo. They sang six or seven songs during the evening, and wow, are they ever good! Their site is mostly in Finnish, but the link “Ohjelmisto” leads to a page with a few sound clips. Here is a YouTube video of them, again only a short clip of about 30 seconds. I really like Finnish folk music, and I like that type of singing, strong voices without much vibrato. If I understood Tero correctly, one of the members of the group is an old friend of Eemeli’s mother, which is why they were hired for the evening. Their first CD (I assume — the site says “recording”) will be out in April. I think I’ll try to get hold of that.

Now I’m confused. I know I wrote two postings that are not here – it looks like I haven’t blogged since September, and I have, I have…

Oh well. Today’s posting was supposed to be devoted to happy things.
Happy Thing #1: the wonderful choir I’m in went to Sligo International Choral Festival and won two of the competitions (check the “Results” link – we’re Collegium Cantorum). It was great fun, very good to visit Ireland again cos it’s been too, too long; lots of fun to be singing competitively, and surprising and VERY fun to actually win!

Happy Thing #2: CdM and Ms CdM are finally going to become guardians of the little Thai girl they are raising – see the entry for Nov 11 on this site for more details. It’s been a very long wait for them.

I wrote a bit back in January and February about joining a new choir. Well, it so happened that that choir, having existed since the late 1960s, disbanded this summer. Was disbanded, really – although there was a bit of dissatisfaction within the choir about the lack of tenors and the fact that we were never able to perform without the support of another choir, I don’t think there was a general feeling that the choir needed to be dissolved. It was, however, and we singers got to apply for other choirs. In particular, we were allowed to apply to a very good choir indeed, one of the other choirs in the cathedral, which I would never have dared apply for if we hadn’t been explicitly encouraged to. So I applied, singing worse than ever before at the audition – however I was accepted (provisionally) and am now a proud and happy member of this group. We’re going to Ireland in November, and have about five other concerts this autumn… so this will fill my free time (cue to fall over laughing) nicely!

Did I mention it’s FUN, though?

I am alive, I am I am!

Have sung Bruckner – Mass in E Minor – with my new choir; have been ill for a long time with lots of minor colds following after each other; have turned 32 (today, as a matter of fact); have done a lot of ODPing and a lot of work – but therre must be more interesting things to talk about here…

Johan had fun last night (and will likely kill me for linking to that picture.)

We’re going to England on Thursday.

I have discovered a dangerously addictive game.

And the Orange MC version of the amazing game 10000 Celerity CDs [sic] has come to an end. It started in August 2001, and is, well, pretty amazing.

Bedtime.

They liked me – they really liked me! I did well on the singing straight from the sheet part, and my ear is pretty good too, but my voice gets all tense and horrible when I’m nervous, and I don’t think I sang beautifully at all… yet I made it. Yay!!

Wish me luck – I’m off to audition for a choir I really would like to get into….

In other news, I’m off to Stockholm this afternoon to rehearse Verdi’s Requiem all evening; hence I’m whistling snippets of Libera Me and Sanctus when I’m walking the corridors. Bringing the colleagues some culture – they should be grateful. . .

I’ll try posting this again, then…. so, I went to the Uppsala Choir School’s spring concert yesterday. This autumn, it will be 20 years since the school started; I was one of the original 60 pupils, so naturally I have a special relationship to the school, and to the spring concert which I remember as the highlight of the school year. It is something extra, still, to hear the 300+ kids ages 9-19 singing together, in particular as much of the repertoire is the same today as it was in my day. But the concert has changed a lot, too, from the straight-laced affair of the 1980s — no dancing or dressing up for us, heaven forfend! It’s good to see that there has been development, even though I have only good memories from the spring concert, myself.

I met one old class-mate: Linda, whom I don’t think I’ve seen since we finished grade 9 in 1988. I wouldn’t have recognised her if it hadn’t been for her smile — in any event, it was really good to see her. We dared each other to crowd up on stage with the other former pupils for the final encore… it’s been a few years too many since I sang the rather peculiar alto part to Sommarpsalm that the UCS uses — it’s one of the songs every choir in this country has on its repertoire, but the UCS version is the only one I’ve encountered where the alto part is mostly the same as the tenor part! It took us half a verse to get into it again, but it’s not as if anybody could have noticed, not in that huge choir.