Alice’s Adventures in an Arts Career

What a concert. Vox Humana’s performance yesterday was more than I could have ever asked for.  I was so happy with they were able to produce.  I was on such a blissful choral high all afternoon.  It still amazes me how, despite the myriad troubles and anxieties leading up to any performance things always seem to come together in the end.  And that’s exactly what happened yesterday.

It seems this choir is forever to be pressed for rehearsal time.  What with sickness, school work, conferences and family obligations, it’s a marvel that we can meet even once a week, and even then our rehearsal numbers often don’t reflect the full membership numbers.  The last two weeks before the concert were mayhem.  I was in and out of London doing my grad school audition, then we had the Easter weekend on top of a slew of illnesses and graduate conferences.  All this left us scrambling to reschedule extra rehearsals.  Our final rehearsal was the day before the concert and even after that two hour session there were ragged ends in our program.

But on Sunday afternoon, we all dressed up in bright colours, put on our nice shoes  and showed up early at the beautiful Windermere on the Mount Chapel.  With refreshed voices and the potent mix of preshow excitement and anxiety we threw everything we had into our dress rehearsal.

I wasn’t exactly worried.  I had my game plan ready.  I knew exactly what I wanted to fix and how I was going to fix it.  However, it wasn’t until they sang “Rauha” and I heard what they made of the piece that I knew we would be okay and were ready to give a performance.  And it was a stunning performance.  It was the best I’ve ever heard them sing and I felt so proud.

We performed “If Thou Wilt, Remember” with Josh on the alto saxophone as our closer.  It was the highlight of the concert.  It felt so good to be conducting that piece and to feel it in my hands.  Nearly a year ago I was submitting it for publication and now here I was conducting it with my own choir.  It felt good.

And now I have some serious post show blues.  Choir is over for the summer and I feel as if I have nothing left to do.  This of course is not really true since I’m always finding myself something new to contribute my talents to.  However, it is possible I will never conduct Vox again.  I may be in another city in the fall and while studying at Memorial is the dream I do desperately want to come true, leaving Vox will be difficult.

I was nervous taking over Vox.  I was not sure I would be able to fill Tim’s shoes.  I wasn’t sure I knew how to keep the group together, or that I would know how to run rehearsals or organize concerts or all the endless little details and jobs that being director required of me.  And it has been trying.  Every now and then the anxiety that I wasn’t doing it right would overwhelm me and I was sure it would all fall apart.  But it didn’t, and we got through and I am so relieved and proud and happy and exhausted.  And I want to it again.

It was a wonderful concert and I’m so proud of what we did.  I’m so happy for the choir and I hope they enjoyed themselves as much as I did.

This Sunday is The Vox Humana Chamber Choir Concert.  It’s been a long road preparing for this event, but things are really coming together now and I’m looking forward to the performance.

Most notably, we will be performing my published work “If Thou Wilt, Remember”.  This won’t be the world premier of the piece since the Toronto Waldorf School high school choir sang it back in February.  However, this will be the London (Ontario) Premiere and it will be the first time I will have conducted it in performance.  We had our first rehearsal with the instrumental solo this evening.  The part will be played by Josh Morrison on the alto sax.  Josh was the one whole initially helped me way back when I was first writing the piece by giving me advice about wind instrument writing.  He was instrumental (pun intended) in the eventually end product of a good, playable and satisfying instrumental part.  I originally wrote it for soprano sax but later switch it to oboe…a decision that Josh is still trying to convince me was a mistake and is on something of a campaign to win me over to the alto sax.  I won’t lie, this evening he made a very good case.

Anyway, there will be plenty of other great piece on the program including Healey Willan’s “Rise up my Love”, several saucy madrigals, some Elgar and some Palestrina.  It should be a wonderful afternoon.

Date: Sunday, April 11th

Time: 3 pm

Location: Windermere on the Mount Chapel, 1486 Richmond Street

Tickets: Adult- $10, Student/Senior- $8.

If you have the time come on out and support us.  It will be a delightful afternoon concert.

The first ever performance of “If Thou Wilt, Remember” happened last Thursday night at the Toronto Waldorf School.  It was a stunning performance.  I’m so happy to have been there.

I can’t even describe the feeling I had when I heard those first two bars of piano intro.  I began to tear up in that moment it was so overwhelming and wonderful.  I was hearing my piece for the first time.  That was the first time I’d head that opening played in a formal performance by someone other than myself.  The choir sang with such sensitivity and attention to the text.  I felt they really had put thought into the meaning of the words and had contemplated the depth of the poem.  I am so honoured that they performed my piece and even more honoured that they enjoyed it so much.  After the performance I was nearly instantaneously surrounded by members of the choir wanting to talk to me about the piece.  I was gratified and rather surprised.  I had not expected such an out pouring of positive feedback.

I can not wait for the next performance of the work which I think will be when Vox Humana performs it in April.  It will be a different experience I’m sure working and rehearsing the piece myself rather than simply listening to a performance by another group.  I’m also even more excited about the up coming release of my newest work “Sweet Child” and am wondering who will be the first to perform that one.  It’s all very exciting and gratifying stuff.

My old high school has written me up in their online newsletter.  A few weeks ago I was contacted by one of the grade eleven students with a series of questions on the topic of “If Thou Wilt, Remember” and my general experiences as a university music student and composer.  My answers have been compiled into a nice composer biography and interview.  You can check it out here.

I can’t wait to go hear the performance.  I’ve been looking forward to it for nearly a month now.  I even went shopping and picked out an outfit for the evening.  I’m going to go looking like I’m just effortlessly fabulous and have my life all pulled together- even if I really don’t.

I really need to enjoy all these good feelings of accomplishment and competence this week because next week is my University of Toronto audition and I’m even more terrified of it than I was for my U of Alberta audition.

It strikes me that I haven’t posted any photos, videos or anything for that matter since the curtain went down on The Gondoliers. Well, here is a little taste of what the show was like.  This is the finale.  It encapsulates pretty the mood and look of the entire show and is indicative of the silly, wild fun we had each and every night.  When I watch this I still smile wide and it’s all I can do to stop myself from dancing and singing along.  It really was that much fun and I miss it terribly.

By the way, the video is mislabeled…it was not a 60’s setting but rather a 50’s setting, but I’m pretty sure that is clear from the costumes, set and reference to 50’s swing/twist, Grease and The King.

It seems I’m on the list for this year’s Brickenden Awards.  For those of you not familiar with the Brickendens, they are London’s local independent theatre award committee. Through their award nomination process, the London community is given the opportunity to vote for and recognize the wealth of talent in this city.

I’ve been listed under the best actress category for The Gondoliers and for best supporting actress for The Taming of the Shrew.  Now, this is the very beginning of the nomination process, so the lists of candidates under each category is quite extensive and covers pretty much every show that has been produced on any kind of stage in London since January.  But still, it is flattering and exciting.

If you’re interested, head over to their site.  Voting ends December 28th, so take a look at the candidates and vote.  A short list of nominees will be released in January.

The Vox Humana Chamber Choir concert was a huge success.  We had an audience, the chapel was gorgeous and the choir has never sounded better.  I was really blown away by their sound and the huge change from the rehearsal the night before to the performance.  It’s amazing what a wonderful, live and resonant acoustic can do to bring a group together and help take care of those rough edges.  Their blend, resonance and phrase shaping was the best it’s ever been, and I suspect much of that had to do with the fact that they were finally in a space that really welcomed their sound.

I am so proud of what we have been able to achieve in this past term.  I’m equally proud of myself for what I’ve been able to achieve.  I went into this not really having run a choir of this level or size.  Every step has been a huge learning step for me and I am so lucky to have so many people round me supporting me, including my accompanist Cheryl Wiseman and my assistant director Anna Chen.

Though, we did have one slight hiccup in the concert.  It really was kind of funny.  Our final piece was “and the glory of the lord” from Messiah by G.F. Handel.  It started out seemingly fine, but then things started to sounds really weird.  Something was really off.  There were crunching, chromatic and atonal harmonies starting to creep in that I’d never heard in Handel before and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.  I was looking and listening to the choir thinking “Are you off? Are you lost? What’s wrong?”. Things were getting worse and worse, and the looks of confusion and fear where spreading across the faces of the choir as they looked to me with that look that says “FIX IT!”   And then our accompanist said “I think I need to start this over.” Turns out, the piece had been started in the wrong key and we were singing “And the Glory of the Lord” in A Flat; our accompanist had been frantically trying to transpose the whole thing down a step as she went.   Well, I laughed, she laughed, the choir laughed, I turned to the audience and said “take two!”…they laughed and we started over and ran the piece without a hitch.  Thinking back on it, it reminds me of the now infamous “Organist on Crack” . That is almost what it sounded like (well, maybe that’s a bit on an exaggeration…okay, more than a bit).  But we shook it off and continued. Really, in those situations, there’s nothing one can do but go on.  My thoughts are “these things happen so you might as well laugh about it.”

On a more academic note, over the course of the last few rehearsals and the performance I was also able to record really good material for my graduate school applications with examples of my rehearsals and performances.  I decided not to include that particular performance of the Handel.

I can hardly wait for next term.  But before then, I have the long task of preparing the repertoire packages again.  I’ve got about half the program ready, but am still searching for a few more pieces and tracking down enough legal copies.  I remember doing this in the summer and it’s time to do it all over again.  But I love it.  I really do love it and I hope it’s what I get to do for the rest of my life.

This Sunday is our concert of our second season.  The concert, titled “Gloria”, will be a program celebrating friends, passion, spirituality and the simple goodness that connects one human being to another and will feature classical and contemporary sacred works with a light Christmas theme and perhaps even a wassailing and drinking song or two. If you are in London, come out and see us!

We are half way through our run of The Gondoliers and several reviews have been published on local theatre review sites.  The reviews are rather mixed;  some love the 1950’s setting, the colour, exuberance and use of 1950’s cliches, while other hate it.  The most common critique is that the orchestra was too loud.  I myself get a brief mention, which also is mixed.  Essentially, one reviewer liked my energy and acting and thought it made up for a lesser quality voice.  Sigh, oh well.  One can’t have stellar reviews all the time and it’s good to know that I need to ratchet up the vocal intensity.  It’s something to work on between now and tomorrow’s show.  However, I was flattered that they liked my acting.

At any rate, I’m having a wild  time performing in this show.  The large audiences make it all that much better, and each performance has been different with new memorable moments, including one night when a large bat was flying around at the top of Act I.  I don’t want the run to end. I already feel strange and useless in this 4 day break we’ve had.  I can’t imagine how much I’m going to miss it when the final curtain comes down.

I’ll write more about the show, my thoughts and experience later, but for now, I’ll link to the various reviews here, here, here and here.

Last night we had our preview performance of The Gonodliers and it was a great preview, though there were a few minor snags and hiccups that I’m sure will be ironed out at tonight’s opening performance.  I had a blast last night and was on such a post show high for several hours after the curtain closed.  I really do come alive and thrive on stage.  There is just no better place to be.

Tonight’s performance should be spectacular and I can hardly wait.  Last night’s audience was a little small, so the reactions were few and far between. There is something of a critical mass of audience members required before they feel safe enough to laugh, clap, hiss, whistle and generally respond.  It’s certainly frustrating as a performer because we feed off of the energy an audience gives us, and if the energy is muted, it makes our job all that more difficult. But, with a larger audience on a Friday night, I am hoping that the theatre will simply be bursting with energy and laughter.

We unfortunately have had a cast member fall ill.  Our “Gianetta” has been battling the flu for nearly a week now.  She performed half of last night’s run before she had to call it quits and we had our director step in to sing her part from the wings.  Tonight, our director will be taking the role completely until our regular Gianetta is well enough to go on.

It’s such a sad situation.  I can only imagine how disappointed and devastated I would feel if I had to sit out of a show. Thankfully, it’s never happened to me *knock on wood* and I hope it never does.  My thoughts are with her now and I am eagerly waiting for her return.  Our Gianetta is stunning and an inspiration to everyone in the cast.  She really is superb and a delight to work with.  I’m going to miss her terribly.

But, the show must go on, as they say.  And indeed it will.  That’s the marvelous thing about theatre, no matter what happens, the collective good will and determination of the group always manages to pull the show through.  Where a hole appears, everyone steps up and fills it in, one way or another.

Tonight, I’m going in with high hopes and high energy.  I’ve been waiting and dreaming for this evening since I landed the role of Tessa and I can’t even begin to describe the number of ways this role has changed me as an artist.  I can hardly wait to run out on stage and just show off all our hard work.

And now I’m off to the theatre to start the character transformation and live in those few short hours where life is perfect, I am happy and nothing beyond the stage matters or even comes to mind.