Busy August

Fact of the matter is, I wasted about four weeks doing nothing in July, that my work piled up this month.  Fortunately I was able to finish it all up yesterday, in one day, as I got up at around 6am and worked straight until the evening (while squeezing in a few hours in between for a much needed spa appointment!). 

So now we have already gotten ready for our big, big concert in September where Vytautas Miskinis is coming to Manila to conduct the world premiere of his new work Six Sights to Song of Songs, to be performed by THE CHAMBER CHOIR OF ASIA, with five new member conductors from Japan (Masahiro Kishimoto), Indonesia (Aida Swenson), Taiwan (Yu Chung Ku), Malaysia (Tracy Wong), and Singapore (Jason Ong).

This is after our successful soft launch part II last Saturday where we sang our repertoire for the International Choir Competition in Tolosa Spain this November.  BUT we are changing some of the songs as they were either not to difficult, or just not too great.  Goodbye Janequin, hello Monteverdi; goodbye Schumann, hello Mendelssohn; and a big golly gush hello to Vytautas Barakauskas.

Anyway, we still have a lot of time to learn the music, considering that we are leaving for Spain on Oct 21, yet!  We only rehearsed the songs three times before we performed them on Saturday last, but funny thing is we only learned some of the songs on the day itself, including the two opera arias from The Magic Flute (Der Hoelle Rache), Turandot (Nessun Dorma) and our encore, Somos Novios, all beautifully arranged by our colleague Robert Delgado.

It has been a hectic month so far, and we are loving it!