Monteverdi madrigal

Here's a video of the King's Singers doing "Si ch'io vorrei morire." Notice especially how they present the piece with their facial expressions.

King's Singers "Si ch'io vorrei"

The Role of the Conductor

This interesting TED lecture makes some important points about the role of the conductor. Overall, Itay Talgam emphasizes the idea that the conductor does not create precision through absolute control; the togetherness of an ensemble is highly dependent on the communication that occurs within and among the ensemble.

Itay Talgam on conducting

Finnish pronunciation

Here is a good 10-minute tutorial on how to pronounce Finnish:

Finnish Pronunciation

pictures from Choir tour

I'm on tour with the Grinnell Singers. On Tuesday, we drove from the desertous inland town of Richland, through the Columbia Gorge to Portland. We stopped to hike at Multnomah falls along the Columbia river. Here are some pictures from our hike. Everyone was so photogenic in the shady light under the falls; even my iphone made some great pictures.

Helen in Irkutsk

Dec. 19, 2009 8:20 am

We’re on the 4:20 train, pulling out of the station in Karsnoyarsk, headed for Irkutsk. Yes, you read it right; it’s 8:20 am in Krasnoyarsk, but we entered a new time zone when we stepped on the train. All along the Trans Siberian, to avoid the confusion of seven different zones, the clocks are coordinated with the time in Moscow. This morning is the mildest day since I arrived, with a light snow, no real bite to the air. We’re hoping that this weather follows us east. We’re in second class, where the beds are configured like the train in Some Like it Hot: rows of bunks in two levels. A short, uniformed woman with Asian features checked our tickets and gestured for us to enter, welcoming us tersely with the number of our seats: “Twenty five.” “Twenty seven.” We whispered as we moved our things about, settling into our bunks in the dark cabin, amid occasional snores, other whispered conversations, muffled announcements over the PA in the station. As the train gains speed, the light grows, and the outskirts of Krasnoyarsk are dimly visible; gusts of snow smear the passing shapes of factories, power lines, telephone poles. For the first couple of hours, we see improbably large, strangely configured pieces of heavy machinery along the road, and an almost continuous thread of buildings. By noon we are in more open country, with great crowds of birch trees pressing in against the tracks. Further in the distance, their delicate upper branches are washed out to gray by the dusting of snow – faint brushstrokes semi-transparent against the pure white of the hillside.

Here's a picture of celebratory New Years' ice house being built in Listvyanka, a town on the banks of Lake Baikal

Atlanta

Here we are in Atlanta on a long layover before our flight to Manaus. (In the picture from the left, Angela, David Campbell, Karen Lowell). We fly through the night and arrive early in the morning. The sattelight picture of


Brazil looks like it's covered with red popcorn--thunderstorms across the entire continent spread evenly, not in a frontal system as in North America. It looks like the rainy season has begun.



-- Posted from my iPhone