Next week I'm going to sing in the Swiss Mountains with Monica Buckland.
Not having sung for a few months, the ol' diaphragm muscles are wobbly. This year the fields are mostly planted with rape rather than sunflowers, which means I am croaking. Not a good start to the delayed learning/practice.
The early sacred music is easy enough (and I could probably sing the Byrd from memory). The Monteverdi madrigal is one I don't know; wonderful but difficult and deserves more time than I'm giving it. I love the jolly old French chanson; the Fanny Mendelssohn is cute; the Brahms and Sullivan are slushily ok. The Matthew Harris song is startling at first, but fits - it's in a kind of folk-jazz style - and the solo is fine as long as I come in at the right place. The David Wikander piece is musically do-able but the Swedish vowels are confusing.
Then we come to the Per Nørgård: Frühling Lied from Wie ein Kind, text by a Swiss poet. It sounds... interesting. Pleasant, but decidedly random. I can't work out quite what's going on with the solo passages until the last page, when there's a clear solo sop line. I doubt I'll survive to the last page.
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