The great Leap into March

Seeing this is a Leap Year, I suppose we should all be gratified at having one more day in which to attempt to pull together all the miscellaneous strands in our personal and professional lives - ha! The day in question was taken up with just as many meetings as usual, at which I made an honest attempt to appear interested, and a rush to complete a candidacy examination for one of our doctoral students. Now on a Saturday, somewhat incapacitated by a wonky swollen knee that severely restricts mobility, I find myself staring at more undone projects, and fending off the inevitable afternoon sleepies. Well, truthfully, I succumbed to the sleepies, and with the aid of the new CBC online Classical music app on my iPhone, was able to catch up on the multiple 1 am bedtimes this week.

Seeing I had not published an entry here since July, after several marooned attempts to reactivate this blog (our Google settings at my home university had changed in the meantime), I am now inspired to utter some inelegant thoughts about one thing or another. Musically this has been an invigorating season, with my symphonic choir the Eaton Singers celebrating its 60th anniversary, of which I've been privileged to have had 30. Our season opened on Nov. 4 with the Beethoven Missa Solemnis, a work I had prepared twice before for the Edmonton Symphony's conductors, but not conducted myself. I had also had the good fortune to perform it twice with Robert Shaw, so it was both inspiring and intimidating to take it on this year myself. Then just a week later, we performed Malcolm Forsyth's (see previous post) A Ballad of Canada with the ESO and Bill Eddins, so a very hectic few months of rehearsal! Now we are working on Handel Israel in Egypt for late April and a Proms concert in mid May.

The Madrigal Singers (university group) have also been having a good year, with an Advent program in late November, followed by a very successful Messiah performance (complete), again with Bill Eddins and the ESO. When I think that, of my 27 choir members, only 5 had sung Messiah before, I am quite proud of their achievement. We are now working on a concert next weekend to inaugurate our new Positive organ (Louder, 2011), which will feature the Bach motet Lobet den Herrn alle Heiden, and Purcell's "I was glad". Two weeks later we have our annual Dinner Concert, and two weeks after that, a guest performance with Pro Coro Canada on a Good Friday concert I will also be conducting. This year's group, with only 12 returning singers, has made superb progress over the year, and I was pleased to remind them at the end of a recent rehearsal that we had not used the piano for an entire 80 minutes, relying completely on tuning forks and tonal memory.

My colleague Debra Cairns and I were quite pleased this past November to receive the Alberta Choral Federation's Patricia Cook Memorial Award for our graduate program in choral conducting which we co-founded in 1989, and which has had nearly 50 Masters and doctoral graduates in that time - most of whom are professionally engaged in choral music across Canada and in several other countries.

One of my favourite pastimes first thing in the morning, over coffee, has been to scan the latest New York Times and Globe and Mail email editions, to enjoy the current political follies in both Canada and the US. Indeed, the whole debacle-filled Republican nomination process has been particularly attractive to the likes of Bill Maher, Colbert and others, resulting in great Friday night entertainment for the rest of us. Now we have our very own developing Robocall scandal in Canada, with the PCs scurrying to find ways to reverse the obvious implications of their technological malfeasance (sending opposition party voters to non-existent polling stations, etc.) I smell some by-elections happening in the near future.

With only 11 cm of snow for all of winter until last week, we really thought we had a pushover of a winter, but alas, 20 cm in two days changed all that, with the resulting sore back and all. Golf season can't be far away though.