My lungs hurt
Am back from a weekend of singing. The Cincinnati Choral Society, along with some soloists whose names I don't remember and a various assortment of orchestra players from CCM, presented Morten Lauridson's "Lux Aeterna" and Schubert's "Mass in A Flat" this afternoon.
I should mention that there are a lot of high notes in the Schubert. A lot. In fact, there are very few times it drops below an E for the sopranos. And that takes a lot of breath support, which is why my lungs hurt. My voice is a little scratchy too, but it went well.
However in retrospect, I wish the director would have just had us do the Schubert and then invited a high school choir to fill the rest of the time, because that was almost too much music. I wasn't very precise by the end. At one point I think I just gave up on counting.
And I have decided after this weekend that I prefer dress rehearsals to performances. There isn't the pressure of an audience yet. It's the first time you get to hear everything together (and singing with orchestral accompaniment is so much fun) and we're so much more musical because the director feels he can stop us and correct or yell at us if we aren't paying enough attention.
Part of this has a lot to do with the fact that though we are auditioned, we are still an amateur choir, not professional. And the other part is, in a performance, you try to do as much as you were trained to do but if you miss it, there's no going back and fixing it. I have many more "spine-tingling omg that sounds amazing this is why I'm up early and drove across town on a Saturday morning" moments in rehearsal than during the performance.
I had a director once tell us that we better enjoy the rehearsals just as much if not more than the performances, because you rehearse a lot more than you perform. And it's true. I almost feel we're more musical in rehearsals. We've rehearsed things time and time again pianississimo and it has a beautiful soft quality to it and then the orchestra comes in and you realize absolutely no one will hear the choir unless you bring it up to a mezzopiano.
Still, the Gloria sounded great today. And we sang our hearts out just like Doug asked on the Alleluias at the end of Lux Aeterna. Even the soft parts were good - once Doug shook his hands in the violins faces to get them to keep it down.
I should mention that there are a lot of high notes in the Schubert. A lot. In fact, there are very few times it drops below an E for the sopranos. And that takes a lot of breath support, which is why my lungs hurt. My voice is a little scratchy too, but it went well.
However in retrospect, I wish the director would have just had us do the Schubert and then invited a high school choir to fill the rest of the time, because that was almost too much music. I wasn't very precise by the end. At one point I think I just gave up on counting.
And I have decided after this weekend that I prefer dress rehearsals to performances. There isn't the pressure of an audience yet. It's the first time you get to hear everything together (and singing with orchestral accompaniment is so much fun) and we're so much more musical because the director feels he can stop us and correct or yell at us if we aren't paying enough attention.
Part of this has a lot to do with the fact that though we are auditioned, we are still an amateur choir, not professional. And the other part is, in a performance, you try to do as much as you were trained to do but if you miss it, there's no going back and fixing it. I have many more "spine-tingling omg that sounds amazing this is why I'm up early and drove across town on a Saturday morning" moments in rehearsal than during the performance.
I had a director once tell us that we better enjoy the rehearsals just as much if not more than the performances, because you rehearse a lot more than you perform. And it's true. I almost feel we're more musical in rehearsals. We've rehearsed things time and time again pianississimo and it has a beautiful soft quality to it and then the orchestra comes in and you realize absolutely no one will hear the choir unless you bring it up to a mezzopiano.
Still, the Gloria sounded great today. And we sang our hearts out just like Doug asked on the Alleluias at the end of Lux Aeterna. Even the soft parts were good - once Doug shook his hands in the violins faces to get them to keep it down.