Face-to-face Festivals

I had the opportunity to hear choirs from around the country at choir festivals in Chicago and Kansas City this spring and it was almost like normal.  The Chicago festival was a one-day event and the first time in two years that I heard, adjudicated, and worked with choirs face-to-face.  It felt familiar, yet different at the same time. Though there were still some masks and an awareness of personal distance, there was also a sense of freedom, released from our little on-screen boxes.  In Kansas City I heard 75 choirs over 4 days, a real luxury of live performance.

Welcome back, everyone!

I was happy to attend both the Midwestern and Southern Region ACDA conferences in February.  The last I attended in person was the 2020 Midwestern convention in Milwaukee. 

Covid 19 was already being talked about – we knew a little about it -- and there were fewer handshakes and fewer hugs than I was used to at choral gatherings.  We were a little careful. I remember a greeting song sung by a featured choir in one of the sessions.  We were all invited to get out of our chairs and join in, singing our way around the room and shaking hands with those we met.  Most of us bumped elbows.  We smiled and laughed a little, nervously.  It already felt strange.  There were more empty seats between us in the concert hall, fewer rows with good friends all scrunched in together.  Socially distanced before that was a thing.  The next week everything changed as we know it.

It was good to be back together in a way that we hadn't for two years.  Beautiful live (though masked) performances were thoughtful and moving, each choir bringing messages of reemergence, reconciliation and reconnection, and dinners together and reminiscences brought a new awareness of what we mean to each other.  We had all forgotten how much we missed this. 

Welcome back, everyone!

December in Chicago

This month I've enjoyed the new production of the Goodman Theatre's A Christmas Carol (before the remaining performances of the run were cancelled due to a rise in Covid cases), Barbara Kruger's overwhelming and powerful installation at the Art Institute (and the annual unveiling of the mid 18th c. Neopolitan Creche), the William Ferris Chorale's first performance in 20 months, and a performance of the Rutter Gloria in my old neighborhood of the south suburbs.  What a great city for music and the arts!

Illinois ACDA conference returns!

The Illinois state conference of the American Choral Directors Association last weekend was only the second live ACDA event since the beginning of the pandemic.  I was delighted to present the opening address, "To Bless the Space Between Us", after a little book of blessings by Irish poet John O'Donahue. It was wonderful to see old friends and new colleagues and hear (masked) choral singing again in the lovely Holtschneider Performance Center of DePaul University in Chicago.

Music in the Air

On July 9th I heard my first live music in a year and four months.  What an extraordinary time of separation from what we do and love.  On that Friday night on Chicago's front lawn of Millennium Park, I heard the Grant Park Symphony and chorus perform music of Vivaldi and Barber and Brahms.  And in the following weeks, performances of Hadyn and Beethoven, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Britten, Broadway classics, traditional folk and contemporary Irish music, rising young stars of the Lyric Opera, and Chicago's famed Music of the Baroque.  All free.  Oh, and food and wine.  What a summer!