Texas, oh Texas, the land of Emily's nativity and hatch chili burritos; you are great place and you do things big. Your high schools are the size of a community college (or bigger), diamonds on rings are the size of small eggs, and your hospitality matches your big flat expanse. We came to visit as a choir and just because it was Texas we did it BIG! Mormon Choral Organizations was invited to sing at the bi-annual America Choral Director's Association convention and we said, "sure thing, here we come". We had 274 adult singers, 226 children, and 88 orchestra members - like I said, Texas likes things BIG! I don't know if Meyerson Concert Hall has ever had the volume of sound we created - big, Big, BIG! I could literally feel the vibrations from the organ at the end on one of the pieces - cool!
It was a great trip and the response we received was VERY kind and enthusiastic. We sang two concerts: one in Allan Texas for the community (including Glen Beck - very Texas - one of my altos is a HUGE fan and just about lost her lunch from excitement) and one at the convention (all choral directors and they gave us FIVE standing ovations through out the concert - eek!). It felt really good to have people enjoy and appreciate the product of so much hard work.
We sang a very challenging program and it was really difficult for many of us to get our rusty brains around the Hungarian, German, Spanish and Latin texts. I remember early in the rehearsal process, I was running a section with the women, slogging through a passage in German and telling them how amazingly proud they would be of themselves when we finally got it. A lot of them looked positively panicked believing they would never get it. On Saturday, as we sang that passage I was so proud of them as the German flowed effortlessly because they had practiced diligently, many of them daily, for weeks. I think that is one of the things I love so much about choir; the hard individual and group work and then the immense satisfaction of not only personally conquering, but as a group making something so much more than the sum of the individual parts because we have all done our prep work.
Anyhow, it was a great trip and Ryan is a champ for being a single parent for 3 days and I have the best cousins in the world for helping with kids while Ryan did some (but not all, I'm sure) of his real job too.
If you want to hear all that great German, Hungarian and the like plus some seriously cool African American spirituals - Mesa Arts Center - April 19th and 20th - 7:30 p.m. I'll be the one in the navy blue choir dress.
3 comments:
Too bad no dangly earrings :)
Glenn Beck mentioned that he did go to a great musical concert over the weekend on his radio this week. So your friend has made it. :)
Very cool! Glad it went well.
Marian -
What a thrill to sing and perform in such a marvelous place. I wish I could have heard it. It is a beautiful thing that you and your choir had privilege to do.
Dad Chase
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