Thursday Thoughts

It is great to be finally back with you all again. I have missed our rehearsals together and Tuesday night was like coming home!  I want to thank all of you for working hard on this program while I was away, but especially I want to thank Tristan and Christina for taking over for me and giving me the opportunity to go away and take some time off. As I mentioned on Tuesday, it is a really good feeling to be able to go away and have complete confidence that he repertoire will be learned and rehearsed.  Thanks to you all.

We have three reherasals until the concert.  That isn't much time and now we need to begin perfoming this repertoire instead of rehearsing it. Of course that means that you will have a complete command of the texts and understand the musical structure of each piece we are performing. And memorization needs to come into play now - being able to sing at least the first 4 bars of each piece from memory, memorizing page turns and really feeling in the bones how the metre changes within the piece (like the 6/8 - 9/8 - 5/4 in the Rautavaara ) and so on. More and more you will be expected to get out of the scores and as we get closer to the concert, you should feel more and more confident in communicating these languages.  Please make this a priority in your prep work.

For next week please concentrate on:
- the three Raminsh Slaivic Folksongs : I wanted to work on both #s 2 &3 on Tuesday but spent so much time on # 2 that we ran out of time. So next week make these 3 pieces a priority.
- Ave Verum - Raminsh
- O Sacrum Convivium - Miskinis (run through if I have time)
- Psalm of Invocation - Rautavaara
- review of 3  Finnish folksongs
- Benedicto - Sisask (performing run through. Work on the areas Tristan mentioned)

Again thanks for Tuesday night. I had so much fun.  But if you missed, remember it is your responsibility to know what we accomplished and keep up on your own.  This "semester" has been plagued with absences and it is very diffucult to develop a cohesive, uniform choral sound in rep as difficult as this with different personnel each reheasal. That puts more responsibility on you as individuals.

So lets all work even harder to do what it takes to get this music off the page. See you all next Tuesday.