Monday night's Vocal Ensemble Solo Concert

This past Monday night (May 10) was the Vocal Ensemble Solo Concert. We had the main Vocal Ensemble concert the previous Monday night (May 3). Apparently last year, the solos performed during the main concert, but this year there were so many people who wanted to do solos that our professor, Bill Bradbury, decided to do a separate concert for them.

Anyway, at the beginning of the semester Bill asked if I'd be interested in playing bells on the solo concert. Of course, I said yes! I decided to play Finlandia because it's a beautiful piece, very accessible to most audiences, and has a big dramatic ending.

Knowing that I'd only have a few minutes of rehearsal time with the accompanist -- mainly because I didn't want to have to schlep my bells to school more than once (the last 2 letters in the acronym for our campus - CSUSM - are said to not be "San Marcos," but rather "Stair Master"!) -- I gave her an MP3 of me playing the piece when I gave her the sheet music. A couple of Mondays ago before Ensemble rehearsal, I sang through the piece with her, too.

So, this Monday I arrived early so I could load in & set up my equipment in the school's theater:



When she arrived, we played through the piece once and hit a couple of spots over again just to make sure we had the transitions down. Then after that, I had about 90 minutes before the concert started, so while the pianist rehearsed with the other students, Brian & I went out for pizza. Yum!

Finally the time came for the concert. Bill took all of those who would be performing over to the other room so we could figure out the concert order. Bill asked me if I would mind going first. I said no problem. After figuring out the rest of the show, we all headed back to the concert hall. Bill asked each of us to introduce ourselves before our piece, so after he did the main intro for the concert, I gave an abbreviated introduction to Finlandia.

Then I played.

I have to say that it was one of my better performances. Everything just kind of "clicked." When I hit the last chord, the audience cheered! Woo-Hoo! :-)

Bill came back on stage to help me move the bells back out of the way for the rest of the performers and as he was doing that, he looked at me and said, "Wow, that was really impressive!" I'm sure I grinned from ear-to-ear to get such a nice compliment from him. Later, he sent me an email saying "Your playing is beautiful and inspiring... I think I might have to write a piece for you (and the choir?)."

How cool is it that an Emmy Award-winning composer wants to write a piece for me? :-)

After the concert, one of the audience members told me that she had spent several years in Finland, and that she loves the song Finlandia. She said that my performance was so beautiful it brought her to tears. My classmates came up to tell me how cool the bells were - many of them had played bells in elementary or middle school, or at church, but had never seen a soloist.

Bill also came up and said, "That was crazy!" I frowned a little bit and replied, "You think I looked crazy when I played?" He said, "No! That's what was crazy about it; you made it look so effortless!" High compliments, indeed. :-)

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