Concentus Concert - One Down, One to Go

(originally written for Concentus' blog)

It's always exhilarating and sad when we reach the culmination of a season's practice and finally perform. Months of rehearsals go into preparing for our concerts – I actually calculated the rehearsal-hours this season: 40, spread over 16 Sunday evenings. Of course, very few in the group attended every rehearsal (I myself am guilty of missing two) because of various scheduling conflicts  or illness. Still, it took many hours to get performance-ready for a roughly one-hour concert. And in those hours we got to understand the pieces in a way that might be difficult to convey to the audience in a single hearing. But that is part of our objective: not just making nice music, but communicating with the audience – the wintry mood of pieces such as Harri Wessman's “Water Under Snow is Weary” (sung in Finnish) and Bruce Sled's wordless “Ice,” * or the whimsy of Jocelyn Pook's “Snow Carol,” or the chant-like quality of Ola Gjeilo's “Ubi Caritas” despite the changing time signatures in our music (as we try to follow Gwen's advice and “get rid of the bar lines”). I know some of us (like me...) have personal objectives as well – to get particularly challenging passages right this time, finally!

Perhaps because we've had almost an extra month of rehearsal since the concert is in January, instead of December, I feel more comfortable and confident with the music than I have for past performances. And perhaps because of that additional time I have grown to love the pieces I initially approached skeptically, as I've come to appreciate their musicality, and the reasons Gwen chose them for this particular concert. So I am very excited to share them with our audience, and doubly glad that we have two concerts, not just the usual one. And that's the sad part – that after living with these songs for so long, waking up to snatches in my brain, it's time to let them go, some of them forever (luckily, Gwen does recycle some of the favorites periodically, like Gjeilo's “Tundra,” one of my personal favorites).

So if you missed our Friday evening performance, you have another chance Sunday afternoon at 2pm at Third Presbyterian on East Avenue, before we head back to the rehearsal room to start preparing for our May concert with the RPO!

* To hear and see the sheet music for this incredible piece, click here: http://larrynickel.com/CypressAudio/Ice.html