Conspirare at World Choral Symposium

I had a chance to hear Conspirare at the World Choral Symposium last night. I enjoyed the performance, but I already knew a little bit about the group because of this blog.

Melissa Givens, pictured at left, is a Conspirare singer that blogs.

She wrote this about a Conspirare rehearsal:

I want to share with you a particularly unexpected and deeply moving moment from this afternoon's rehearsal. One of the songs we're performing is "Soneto de la Noche," the second piece in a triptych by Morten Lauridsen to a text by Pablo Neruda.

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This particular text caused more than one person to choke up or actually tear up at one point or another in the rehearsals. It is undeniably a touching text. But today was different.

Today locked it in for pretty much everyone. Craig (Hella Johnson), in his infinite wisdom, had us listen to the Spanish being spoken phrase by phrase, repeat the Spanish back, and listen to the same text spoken in the English translation. A brilliant pedagogical moment that is probably not unique to us, but here's the masterstroke: We then sang it, while one of our beloveds, David F. spoke the text over our singing.

No one was prepared for what came next. Maybe all of our defenses were broken down by 3 days of all day and into the night rehearsing. Maybe it was the combination of a powerful text, set powerfully by a master composer. Maybe it was the addition of that last layer of the same powerful text we were singing being rendered pitch perfectly by a reader we all love in a language we comprehend on a heart level, versus the head level of an acquired tongue. Maybe Mercury was in retrograde.

But almost to a one, the room erupted, spontaneously, in sniffles, sobs, hitched breaths. Tears streamed down faces-- even faces one never expected to see bathed in tears. It was not everyone at once, but nearly everyone by the end of the song. I know some were shocked by their response. I know that I was.

Read the whole post . . it's a beautiful thing.