Minnesota has always been really important to us. As everybody knows, it's the home of the most vibrant choral tradition in the U.S., and people here have always offered Chanticleer enormous support and appreciation.
Dale Warland ( Founder of the Dale Warland Singers) was a source of wisdom and encouragement to our founder, Louis Botto, and Minnesota Public Radio started broadcasting us almost immediately in those early days, bringing us to an enormous audience we could never have reached otherwise. They still do broadcast us regularly. So we're very happy to be here collaborating with them on this residency. Today we drove l80 miles or so from Hibbing to St. Cloud where we met and worked with the Apollo High School Concert Choir. The high school was built around l970, named for NASA's Apollo Space program then in its heyday, and acquired this genuine space artifact.
As always, we introduce ourselves by singing - this time with a barbershop arrangement of the early 20th century classic "Without a Song"...
and Matt tells the students the story of Chanticleer.
The chorus sings a piece called Abendlied for us, and Eric takes on German pronunciation. ( He's our expert, as he should be, since his wife is German.) Young choristers of course focus on their sound - the next step is communicating the text with clarity and conviction.
We then join the chorus to sing it with them.
We finish by singing their other piece - 'Joshua fit the battle of Jericho' with them, after talking about the particular challenges of this kind of music. Then a q and a, and we have to leave. We enjoyed this choir very much, and are glad that MPR introduced us.
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wow thanks u guys so much for coming to apollo. we were all just
ReplyDeletetalking about how lucky we r to have had that opportunity to
expirience so much education stanindg right infront of us^^ have fun
in china!