Thursday, January 02, 2020

I must tell you about the sing-along Messiah Judith and I went to because, well, I must. First of all, I usually go to the Unit church, you know, the Unitarians. They have a real orchestra and a packed house of singers and mountains of cookies for the breaks. Oh, and a really, um, hot conductor with a half white and half brown eyebrow. So there's that. And they give away prizes and let one of us conduct the Hallelujah chorus.

However.

This year I was out of town for that event so we went to another church and so.

The conductor has recently had two knee replacements which he reminded us of a lot. The orchestra was skimpy, very skimpy. And no trumpet. :-(. I mean, how can you sing, "The trumpet will sound" without a trumpet. In fact the only woodwind we had was a clarinet which was quite squeaky. And the violin was cringy. The cellos were ok and thank gawd for the piano.

We stumbled around quite a bit. Some of those choruses are tricky without strong singers and I am not what I would call a strong singer.

The whole thing lasts 3+ hours on a good day but with one thing and another we took almost 4 hours. At one point I looked at Judith and her eyes were closed. I thought she might be meditating but she told me later she was sleeping a little. Oh dear.

Anyway, the Hallelujah chorus sounded splendid. You really can't fuck that one up.

May we all survive 2020 with sanity intact. Avoiding all but the most pressing news would be a start for me. Every tweet from the asshole in the White House is not necessary to know about.

More love. More joy.


3 comments:

Ms. Moon said...

Well, the experience may not have been the same but it was an experience. Right?
I applaud you for participating in such a joyous event.
Yes. More love and more joy. Let there be light! And let the trumpet sound.

Sabine said...

Ahh, how anazing. Four hours of singing. I did Händel's Messias once in a school choir and despite all my teenage energy, I was beat at the end of all the rehearsals and the performance was like the final stretches of a marathon.

But singing is brilliant, isn't it?

The totally different Hallelujah, you know, the other one, I would love to sing in that crowd and with that lead singer:

https://youtu.be/AGRfJ6-qkr4

Elizabeth said...

Hilarious. I don't know if I could have handled four hours with such equanimity. Happy New Year to you, dear Beth!