Triumph!

I am super excited to report that my audition last Thursday night for the Brussels Choral Society went well and....I was ACCEPTED to the choir! Thanks to everyone who kept encouraging me and sending good vibes as I was preparing for this audition. (Seriously, it's been months now!)

For those of you who have never heard me sing (which is probably most of you), here are a couple of pics from past gigs.

Singing at Pathways Church last Christmas -- that's my brother on mandolin behind me


Singing classically with the Cherry Creek Chorale


For those of you not musically-inclined, that's about all you need to know. But just in case you're curious about the choir and how an audition works, here are some details:

The Brussels Choral Society was founded about 30 years ago and is the leading amateur symphony chorus in Brussels. There are about 100 people in the choir, and singers hail from 20+ countries. The conductor gives his direction half in English, half in French (with some Italian and German thrown in for good measure!) The director is American, but he has been in Brussels for many years as he chairs the Performing Arts Department at the International School of Brussels. From what I have seen thus far, he is an inspiring director. His passion for the music is obvious, as is his attention to the subtleties and fine details that really make the music come to life. Simply put, he makes you want to sing well for him.

The audition process is rather serious, and they require that prospective members sit in on a couple of rehearsals before doing the audition. The audition itself consists of four parts: a piece of your own choosing, a selection from the work the choir is currently rehearsing (in my case, this was the most challenging movement of Brahms' Deutsches Requiem, in German of course, which is NOT one of my good languages--yikes!), some scales and vocalization, and then a short piece to sight-read (thankfully, the piece they gave me was in Latin, which is arguably my best language to sing in after English).

Mentally, this was my best audition ever: I was calm, I was prepared, I felt comfortable in front of the committee. Singing-wise, I'm not exactly sure how it went. My prepared piece, Robert Burns' Ae Fond Kiss set to a traditional Scottish melody, went really well. But the rest....it's sort of a blur to me. Point being, the committee observed something they liked and thus I was accepted. Hooray for that!

My first concert with the BCS will be Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem at the Palais des Beaux-Arts (aka Bozar) in Brussels in late November. In December, we sing at the wedding of an archduke who is a friend of one of the Belgian princesses. (Yes, really a duke...only in Europe, right?) Then, next March, we travel to Madrid to sing at the ceremony commemorating the five year anniversary of the terrorist bombings there. It's terribly professional and serious, n'est-ce pas? I am SO excited to meet the diverse members of the choir, explore the music with the director, and sing in some amazing places and spaces here in Europe.