Bees and blossoms

This post is brought to you by the letter B!

Yesterday was a sunny Sunday, so I had fun experimenting with Dad's camera in the garden. We parked the tripod near the plum tree which is just starting to bloom, zoomed in and focused on a cluster of blossoms, and waited for bees to come and pose for their portrait...

(click to enlarge photos)

When I had plenty of bee photos, I abandoned the tripod and went on the hunt for other wildlife. I got lucky with a monarch butterfly, which was resting on the ivy, and a tui which obligingly presented its profile.

As usual, Hazel the cat had been accompanying me around the garden, so I got a few shots of Her Majesty in her domain. :)

So long (for now)

Wellington, it's been a great 13 years! (Has it really been that long?)
See you again soon.

Now for a couple of weeks of R&R at my favourite holiday destination, Mum and Dad's house in Whakatane. And then on to Melbourne!

Vespers II

Well, last night I had my final singing occasion at St Mary's before I cross the ditch. We had a sung Vespers, followed by a short concert which included a big, big solo for me in Mendelssohn's 'Hear My Prayer'.

The Mendelssohn piece was a kind of send-off for me - definitely going out on a high note, hurr hurr. But it really was! It's the longest solo I've ever done. It was great fun to sing, and having a really good accompanist (Tom) made it easy to relax and get into it. I love it when I flick into 'performance mode' and stop feeling self-conscious, and the rhetoric just comes naturally. It was also nice to have Willie and Rowan in the audience for moral support, and the three of us had a good feed afterwards at Satay Palace, one of our old-fave cheap-and-tasty places on Cuba St.

I don't usually listen to recordings of pieces I'm preparing to perform (at least, not too close to the performance), because it makes it harder to come up with my own interpretation. But it's fun to do when the performance is all done and dusted! I found this 1980s recording with Kiri Te Kanawa, a singer who a certain primary-school teacher of mine adored. ;)

It's a very different singing style to mine, but it really brings out the chocolate-box aspect of the music! Good fun.

I'm really going to miss being part of St Mary's Choir. Such a lovely (and interesting) group of people! It's hard to believe, but I joined a whole decade ago, during my honours year at uni. I was attracted by the prospect of singing Medieval and Renaissance music, and I was studying Latin at the time and loving it. I started out in the alto section, with almost no voice - no resonance, dodgy tuning, pretty much bad all round! But I could read music, and I was keen, and over time I got better. ;)

Robert, the choir director, really inspired me with his passion for early music, and when I started having voice lessons with him and working seriously on my singing, it all got easier and easier (and more and more fun). Now, I feel like I'm in a good position to try the waters in a bigger pond - I finally have the confidence to have a go at pretty much anything. As long as I keep practising! And I'm looking forward to joining in with St Mary's choir on my trips back to NZ.

New pattern: Bright Side

My new shawlette pattern is now available: Bright Side!

 

 

With its raindrop lace and its bright striped edge, Bright Side is a picture of a rainbow on a rainy day. The story behind this design is that just as new and exciting things in life often take stress and hard work to achieve, you can't have a rainbow without rain - hence the name Bright Side. :)

See my previous post 'Rainbows make everything better' if you want to know more about how this pattern came to be...

Vespers I

My last two Wellington gigs (for a while, anyway) are both Vespers services, but rather different in terms of music, performers, and style!

On Saturday evening I took part in a semi-regular 'Bach Cantata Vespers' at a local Lutheran church. Different Wellington choirs are invited to sing at these, and this time the Tudor Consort provided the singers. We did Cantata No. 102, 'Herr, deine Augen sehen nach den Glauben', which has a great opening chorus, solos for alto, tenor, and bass, and of course a closing four-part chorale. On the instrumental parts, we had a quartet of modern strings, two modern flutes, and organ.

We were only two-to-a-part, which was nice - good clarity (which you really need in Bach choruses), and we each had a buddy to sing with. We weren't able to rehearse together except on the day of the Vespers, so we liked having that extra safety net of someone singing our part with us. If we'd had more time, we would have done most of the chorus with solo voices, with the others joining in when appropriate.

Here's a recording of the opening chorus by John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir. They have a larger number of singers (not my preference), and period instruments (jealous!):

As I said, it's an awesome chorus! Nice and fast and exciting to sing. Well worth the hour-and-a-half church service. ;)

Vespers II will be at St Mary's on Wednesday night. I'll get to sing solos in Mendelssohn's cantata 'Hear my Prayer', and Monteverdi's 'Ave Maris Stella'. Luckily we'll get a bit more practice time for this lot.