January: Vienna

Here is the street where we live. Our hotel (of which we are very fond - we stayed here last time too) is on the left. The Belvedere is just a few doors down.

It's cold and we all bundled up, except for Matt Curtis who comes from Wisconsin and came to Chanticleer from Minnesota and doesn't seem to need an overcoat.

Jeunesse Musicale - the organization which invites us to Vienna- offers 4 pre-concert workshops each season. We did one last time we were here - two years ago- and they asked us to do it again. Subscribers may opt for the workshops but the capacity is limited to 40. There was apparently a waiting list for ours! We start out by singing a few songs.

The main objective is for the people to try doing what we do. They moved into voice categories, we joined them, and Matt led us through Byrd's Ave Verum Corpus (with German Latin pronunciation-an interesting change for us.) Although the attendees manifested a lot of modesty, they were really good!

After we did a pretty good rendition of Ave Verum Corpus, we taught them the gospel song "All night, all day, the angels are watching over me" in the same way we learn it - without music.

A very lusty performance resulted with some spontaneous high notes at the end - not just from us! As two years ago, we enjoyed this chance to interact with people who will be in our audience tomorrow night.