Last night, I was fortunate to sing with 150 other people in a Community Chorus performing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Fox Valley Symphony Orchestra. It was a wonderful opportunity, a difficult piece to sing, and ultimately a truly powerful experience. Several of us commented after ward that it went by so quickly. It's a demanding piece and requires physical and mental focus and energy, so much so that the time slips away.One of the gifts music gives is the requirement to be "in the moment", and we got to spend six months of preparation in order to spend a long moment in a bit of Beethoven's world. Even after repeated listenings to several recordings of the work, even after rehearsing so long and so often -- daily practice and twice weekly rehearsals for the past couple weeks, I barely scratched the surface of Beethoven's musical art. The tempo shifts, dynamics and harmonies brought a high degree of drama to Schiller's transcendent words.
And then there's the experience of singing together with 150 people. This was another new experience for me and there's tremendous power in so many people working together to create a tightly constructed performance. We were fortunate to have a gifted choir director in Austin Boncher, who surely has a great love for music and teaching in order to build a choir from scratch. Austin needed patience, persistence, humor and talent to bring us together and help us climb to where we needed to go. And all that was just to get us ready for the symphony, soloists and conductor. To complement all that talent and create the synergy of the fourth movement was a unique privilege. To sing with eleven people form our church choir as well as three other people from the library was all frosting on the cake!
Freude, for sure!
No comments:
Post a Comment