Our first full day in Romania

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  Bucharest, Romania
Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Hello friends!

We've had a wonderful first full day in Romania.  The only
disappointment so far is I haven't found an internet cafe where I can
upload the pictures we have to show you, but hopefully we'll find a way!



The day just finished with our first performance, at a Lutheran Church
in the center of the city.  We had a number of concerns about this
one - since it doesn't involve another choir, we were afraid that we
might not have much of an audience

Altar in Lutheran Church

.  But that happily turned out
not to be the case!  We also were concerned because we had to
change the program when we found out just last week that the organ was
not functioning well enough to do our pieces with organ.  So we
bravely substituted our three Romanian folk songs that we have been
feverishly rehearsing for the last two weeks to sing with the local
choirs in Timisoara who recently emailed them to us.



But with the help of the church organist and his sister, we did ok -
after a 2 hour rehearsal this afternoon, we started singing them more
confidently,
even if we didn't have every syllable right.  Vlad Nastase, the
organist, encouraged us to go ahead and sing them more boisterously -
that our pronunciation was fine.



The church was one of two Lutheran Churches in the city.  The
dominant religion in Romania is the Romanian Orthodox Church (which
means they don't have many organs, which we should have known!) 
This church was very plain, relatively small (room for about 200 people
at most), but with a very high ceiling, a dome, and wonderful accoustic
(but no air conditioning!)

Choir performing in Lutheran Church

.  There was a large painting of Christ
above the altar that was unlike any that I have seen - a more
round-faced Jesus than usual (more like the people of this region,
maybe) with a more complex expression.



At any rate, we had a very nice audience of maybe 100 people (including
our 10 fellow travellers), for whom we sang "Hark I hear the harps
eternal" of Alice Parker (another last-minute addition to our
unaccompanied repertoire, a favorite that everyone already knew), our
Kalinnikov and Mendelssohn anthems, four spirituals, and our three
Romanian songs.  One of the disadvantages of conducting the choir
is that I don't get to see the faces of the people in the audience -
but I do see their reflection in the faces of our singers

Greeting our audience on walk in front of church

.  And
they were enjoying themselves - afterward they said the faces in the
audience were very attentive and responsive to us, and especially lit
up with big smiles when we sang the Romanian songs.  We even did
one again as an encore! 



After the concert, Vlad told us that Romanian audiences are generally
very restrained (kind of like American audiences, I guess!), and only
give standing ovations very grudgingly - so we felt very privileged to
receive one here, even though we had a few obvious glitches.  We
all left the church sweating profusely, but feeling very happy about
our first performance and grateful for the welcome we had received.

Greeting the audience after our first concert

Last night, we had dinner at a large restaurant with Romanian musicians
and dancers.  It was quite a performance!  Not just a cheesy
for-the-tourists thing, but these guys really played!  Very fast
dance tempos, some fantastic fiddle playing, and a fellow who was a
virtuoso with the wooden pan pipes (a series of wooden pipes of
increasing size, attached to each other, played something like a
harmonic, but with a huge variety of sound).  The dancers changed
costumes every number (my daughter Devin would have loved them) and
kept up with the blistering tempi of the musicians without breaking a
sweat (well, at least figuratively!)  The food was interesting - a
distinctive kind of Romanian sausage that most tried but few finished -
but wonderful local beer and great spumoni-like coffee ice cream to
finish it off.



There was also a dance band that played mostly covers of well-known
Western standards - which gave Steve and Kay Rock a chance to celebrate
their 1st wedding anniversary in style - Steve is a longtime member of
BCCS, and he and Kay went on the last BCCS tour, to Estonia and Russia,
towards the beginning of their relationship, so it was a sweet occasion
for us all.



I had an adventurous excursion to find some scores of Romanian choral
music.  The Romanian choral tradition is very strong and
disctinctive, both in sacred and folk music for unaccompanied
choir.  Stopping at a very small classical record store yesterday
afternoon, I asked where one could buy this music, since it is
completely unavailable in the US.  The man in the store was
puzzled at first, but a friend in the kiosk next to his suggested the
national Conservatory of Music a few blocks away had a store where I
could buy this music.  So I tried earlier today and was very
lucky.  Most of the school was underconstruction and out of
session.  But the staff people there were kind enough to find
someone who could speak English who brought me to a small back room
where another staff person was there for only two hours.  I was
able to purchase 5 volumes of Romanian music, much of it handwritten in
inexpensive collections used by the conservatory choir - what a
treasure!  (Of course there was alarm when the singers back at the
hotel heard this, struggling as they were already with pronouncing
Romanian!  But they assured each other I was bringing it home to
use with my college choir - HA!  little do they know!!!!!)



Well, that's probably more than you bargained for for today! 
Tomorrow we visit the "Black Church" and one of Dracula's haunts. 
Good night from Bucharest!

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