Dear Choral Arts blogosphere readers:

This week is a busy one for us - we are delighted and honored, as always, to sing with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra!  Jack Everly, a revered conductor who focuses on golden age entertainment music, leads us and the BSO in an incredibly thrilling show that tracks popular music for the stage.  We begin with operetta from Vienna and migrate all the way to modern Broadway, catching favorites like “The Merry Widow”, “Kiss Me Kate”, “Candide”, and “Phantom of the Opera” along the way.

Being a chorus for a symphony is a special skill.  It’s my job as chorusmaster to essentially prepare the chorus to be as musical as ever, but this time with an extra element of flexibility and on-your-toes musical thinking than other concerts.  At the end of the day I don’t conduct my own ensemble but hand it off to someone else; it’s the goal to make the choir like a really nice sportscar that the maestro can climb into and drive as fast or slow as desired and with as much elasticity as possible.

I hope you’ll have a chance to join us: Thursday at Strathmore in Montgomery County, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at the Meyerhoff in Baltimore.  It’s going to be a wild musical ride!

Musically,

Blake