Saturday, May 15, 2010

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Our second day at Oxford. We started the day off with a little rehearsal for our Sacrament meeting performance tomorrow before heading off to Oxford. It felt SO good to sing in a real ensemble! I have been missing it so much and it was such a release to produce good, healthy sound that could fuse with other's beauty to create something entirely beautiful and uplifting. Singing just feels so wonderful! As we use our God-given instruments in the correct way, it is is astounding the things we can produce.

Then out to Oxford we went. We were pretty much free the entire day, so Scott, Michelle and I went off on our own and wandered the town. I have been needing some new headshots, so as we wandered, we would stop at random places we felt had good backgrounds and lighting, we would stop and snap a few photos. If you want to see them, go on facebook and check them out.

I am totally in love with that city! Everywhere I walked there it was like I was walking through some 19th century university town. Some of the things that amazed me most were (1) how incredibly clean it was and (2) how GORGEOUS it was. It totally blew me away. I was beside myself. I loved the narrow passageways and tall, OLD buildings; the green, luscious grass outside the buildings; the immaculate courtyards in all of the buildings; the quaint shops; that 15,000 of the 150,000-person city commutes by bike to work and school—everything! It is just such a wonderful place.

We went to Evensong at New College, which is a boys choir that won a Grammy a couple of years ago for their recording of the Bach Cantatas. Those boys were fantastic singers. It struck me particularly amazing that little 8 and 9 year-old boys could concentrate for such extended periods of time and remain well-behaved through all the rehearsal. Their voices, as everyone says, had such such a pure and effortless sound to them. They just soared in their ranges and could stay up in the rafters or hours on end. It really was amazing to hear them do it.

And they were so musical! They were doing advanced tuning things with their voices and were making some extraordinary music. They did some very tough repertoire and really nailed it pretty dang well. I was highly impressed. One of the things I really like about the choir was that there weren't any parts sticking out. Earlier in the week, I wrote about the Tallis Scholars and The Sixteen and how I was a bit irritated that the sopranoes stuck out a bit from the texture. But in this choir, the balance was there. And I loved hearing the well-balanced choir because they sang and moved as if they were one body. It was really quite refreshing.

Then back on to the buses and headed back to London.