Since our reading this week was all about planning a choir tour, I decided to use a video from our own Hartt Choir Tour. This is the 2011 Hartt Choir Tour performing "Sing Me to Heaven" at a church in Budapest, Hungary. With the exception of one 40 year old doctoral student, there are 27 singers all college-aged and this an SATB piece.
I wanted to choose a piece from a choir tour, and I decided to choose a choir tour that I was actually a part of. Holt and Jordan talked in great detail about the success behind planning a successful choir tour. From my experience, and by Holt and Jordan's standards, this tour was very well planned and very successful. Our choir director worked with a great tour company. Aside from being well fed and housed, the overall travel experience was phenomenal. Throughout the tour we did not simply go on a "trip." We went to both Vienna and Budapest and all of the stops that we made on the tour all related to music. Granted we got a lot of general history lessons on the tour as well, but we learned a lot of music history and visited a lot of historical musical sights. Additionally, we were able to do what Jordan and Holt mentioned and made singing part of our daily routine. This was one of the two formal performances that we had throughout the trip. However, every single day we either sang on the streets or just walked around to countless churches and sang in them (with the permission of the people in charge of the church). Like Jordan and Holt mentioned, we all felt immediate joy and satisfaction out of performing on the street, and being able to hear how amazing we sounded in these amazing acoustical spaces throughout the entire trip.
We did perform some Hungarian repertoire because we were going to visit there primarily and wanted to embrace the music of the culture we were traveling to. However, like this piece, we sang a lot of American music as well. Jordan and Holt mentioned how people from other countries really want to hear some great American choirs, and they are 100% right. We got amazing responses from all of our performances, whether they were formal or just casual street performances.
This performance was one of my absolute favorites. As a choir we were all completely moved by this performance. This was one of our last stops on the tour and a beautiful space to sing in. Our sound just rang through this church and we really immersed ourselves in the music. There were surely a couple of nit-picky errors with our performance. However the audience and a lot of the choir was moved to tears after this performance. I think this performance speaks for itself, as to what makes a successful choir tour.
This is one of my favorite choir pieces, and a reverberant performance space always helps with the performance, especially with a slow-moving harmonic piece like this. The blend in the tour choir is wonderful, and the tuning of this ensemble is exactly what is needed to perform this piece well. Great selection. Very well done.
ReplyDeleteAs I've stated before, I love this piece because of the deep emotional text and how perfect the music aligns with it. Obviously Dr. B is brilliant for really examining the text and discovering the deeper meaning of a piece, and that is evident here; a very effective performance. I agree with John that the space really helps you guys out because you can really hear everything ringing and it all comes together so nicely. The tuning is great because each chord locks and like I said, the space really helps with that. A lovely performance.
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