I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills

Before we talk about the concert, we have to talk briefly about Sunday morning's service. You see, you must understand what happened at 11am in order to understand the state of absolute mental terror I was experiencing. It's actually not a very interesting story; Ned gave me a solo in a 60 second piece (that everyone knew expect for me) and I totally croaked in the first two bars. The rest of the solo bit was fine, and everyone was really nice about it, but it was unbearably embarrassing.

Okay. Now. The concert. There's this rhyme my dad used to repeat to me all the time: "There once was a girl with a little curl / right in the middle of her forehead. / When she was good she was very very good, / and when she was bad she was horrid." That's pretty much how our concert went.

We opened by processing to psalm 121 - and when I say "we opened," what I really mean is "I opened." At the dress rehearsal the night before (!), Ned was like, "Hey, Betsy, you do this." So... okay. I totally fudged it when we were practicing just before the concert, but I pulled it off during the actual thing. (It was actually really cool; the acoustics in St. Sulpice are incredibly welcoming, which helped me a ton.)

We only did really well on a couple pieces. The harder ones, the ones we had performed beautifully (more or less) at the rehearsal the night before, we bombed. I'm still kind of upset about it, so I'm going to mostly just write about the screw-ups.

a) Allegri's "Misereri Mei"
First of all, the guest woman who sang the soprano 1 solo was a mess. She scooped up the the C, and sounded like she was screaming. Also, somehow the sop 1s entered on the wrong note on the very first verse, and it took them like 5 measures to fix the tuning. A lot of people came to the concert expressly for this piece...les pauvres.

b) Davy's "Stabat Mater"
This work is really, really, really hard - mostly for the 5 people in the semi-chorus. Regardless, the reason you're picked to be in the semi-chorus is because you're up to the job, right? Hypothetically. So... yeah.

c) Howell's "Like as the Hart"
Actually, we were pretty good on this one. I'm listing it because I did the soprano solo at the end and got a little extemporaneous. Oops. (Doubt anyone who didn't know the piece noticed, though)

We sang about 90 minutes of music, so obviously there was a lot more that we did wrong, and some things we did right that I'm not mentioning. I don't really want to write any more, though, because it was a really frustrating experience.

The highlight of the thing was that Nellie, Laura, Jed, and K came. It meant so much to see my friends in the audience! (Plus, K brought me flowers, which was sweet.) The four of us, plus Harry, a new boy in the choir, went out for champagne after the concert. Jed had tons of work to do, so he left after the drinks, but the rest of us trekked to my apartment for dinner. It was an absolute blast.

I had spent about 45 minutes roaming an outdoor market on Saturday morning, and found some beautiful cheeses (including époisse, a stinky cheese from Bourgogne) and a lovely pork loin. Rather than buying random wine, as I usually do, I actually went to a cave and asked for recommendations. The woman suggested two Beaujolaises that would go well with the orange glaze I was making. (Dinner: roast pork loin with orange glaze, cousous, and brussel sprouts.) We sat around for nearly 5 hours eating and drinking and, in Nellie's case, putting on a fashion show. I was really impressed that Harry stayed the whole time; I thought for sure we would scare him away by, you know, just being ourselves, but he totally gave as good as he got. So I guess that's something good that came out of that disastrous concert: we made a new friend.