I had intended to catch the dress rehearsal on Saturday after taking the express train from Paris, but ended up schlepping myself and my bag for a good hour around the neighborhood near the Louisa metro stop, having gotten bad directions from several cheerful but completely misinformed passersby! No harm, no foul (except for my sweatiness)--I got there, enjoyed a beer with my brother at the cafe next door, and went to dinner with his wife and my niece later that evening. As my brother warned me, on the morning the attendees would run a gauntlet of panhandlers with faces straight out of a Brueghel painting--after all this was the 'hood where the Brueghels lived!The Minimes concerts are a beautiful tradition: the chorus is mostly amateur, the orchestra a mix of amateur and professional players, and the level of performance is quite good. Back in the early days my father had dropped in and played viola with the group while visiting my brother, and in the mid-80s
I had played recorder in a couple of concerts the group did as part of a festival in southern France. Like so much of Brussels the organization is extremely polyglot, and if you can't follow rehearsals in Flemish and French you are in trouble; there are three music directors who rotate through, and all are fluent in multiple languages; many of the members can effortlessly switch from German to French or Flemish to English, and hardly show they know they're switching. Amazing.The run-through begins at 9 AM and there are always audience members who are there before the musicians, staking out their chairs and settling in to hear the cantata twice, in effect. The age range seems to be from babes in arms to nonagenarians, and I'm sure that there are some now attending as adults who were first brought as infants.
By the 10:30 start time there are upwards of 300, with some standing, and by tradition the audience is coached in the Chorale and invited to sing along. I was very proud to see my brother working this way, clearly enjoying professional-musical and personal success; I was also glad to see a familiar face of Julius' old friend Jacques, who'd recently reconnected after several years.The music (no. 30, Freue Dich, Erloeste Schor) was glorious, the small chorus sounding good, Julius' cello students holding down the continuo fort with some struggle but a good bit of success, and the professional soloists making some tough bits sound pretty easy (the soprano in particular seemed to have no problem with high B's at 10:45 in the morning, even, as my brother pointed out, with the organ's tuning getting slightly higher with the warm weather).
In the afternoon most of the group re-united for a potluck garden party barbecue at the home of one of the violinists, and I got to hear at least 30 people comment on how much my brother and I resembled each other in facial characteristics, voice, body language, you name it. Pretty funny, but moving in a way.Later in the evening was the Annual General Meeting of the Brussels Madrigal Singers, which my brother directs, and which has some overlap with the Minimes group; I mostly hung out like a fly on the wall, but chipped in a couple of comments when I thought some of our experience with PME was relevant. I was also amused to see some of the same group dynamics operating here as in PME, as minor complaints about attendance or punctuality were voiced and (in this case) fairly quickly dismissed as the facts of non-professional music life that they are.
Throughout the day I was still writing and answering e-mails about the Tour. The big decision was whether to spring some extra dollars on a facility near the Luxembourg that would provide a classroom space for the 30 of us: there was no room big enough in our hotel, and what had been proposed was private dining room in a nearby restaurant, but in the end I realized the convenience of the new location and its other features would offset the added costs that had been imposed since earlier programs had used this particular facility in the past. Hey, this is why it's Grand, right? I continued to marvel at how tirelessly the Program Coordinator was working even on a weekend, knowing she also had half a dozen other programs to ride herd on. Go Kathy!
Today after a mixed sleep I spent most of the day trying to get organized with calendars and lists, semi successfully, and I also took a wonderful run in the Foret de Soigne, one entrance of which is a few hundred yards from our front door. Getting lost on confusing paths amongst the beech forest was actually quite pleasant, and I went probably 5 more miles after taking leave from Julius who not only had a cello lesson but also had to take it easy due to a bronchial problem and some potential back issues still lingering after his 2007 bout with staph abscesses near his lower spine.
All in all a great couple of days, both in the personal and professional sides of my life, and I really feel the Tour is going to actually happen and be a success. Now I have to plan some more, plus craft a pre-flight Welcome e-mail and nail down a few dozen more details before setting off for London on Wednesday.
As I post this I look out over the rooftops and it is only just getting competely dark--at 10:45 PM. Yet another thing to get used to while traveling....
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