Yesterday LAB choir did a whole day around Santa Rosa to the North of us, starting at 8.00am at Montgomery High School, going on to Hidden Valley Elementary, then Summerfield Waldorf, and ending the day performing for the SF Symphony Marin League.  Ben writes:

The photo below is from Hidden Valley Elementary, where we sang for about 300 K-6th graders.  LAB sang really well all day.  Had a good choral exchange with Montgomery High School and endouraged them to come to Skills/LAB in August.  Both their chamber and concert choir sang for us.  For our last concert – for the Marin League of the SF Symphony – the audience asked so many interested and interesting questions that we nearly doubled the expected concert length.

 

Meanwhile we ( Chanticleer) are in rehearsal for our Mission Road concert. Professor Craig Russell ( who exhumes this music in Mexico)  and prepares it for us started us of with an illustrated lecture about the music and its origins, and put us in the mood to be back in the missions.

LAB 6 got on the road ahead of us and has been performing their program "Music of New Spain" around the Bay area for a while.  Now known as LAB 6.5, they are today ramping up their preparation under their Director Ben Johns, and talking the logistics necessary to join us on our Mission tour coming up in June.  They'll be giving pre-concert performances outside a number of the missions, to bring our audiences into the musical and historical spirit.

We're starting rehearsal on Monday with Antoine Plante,  of Houston's Mercury Baroque who will direct our Mission Road program.

(Ben broke his shoulder skiing a couple of months ago.  This hasn't prevented him from conducting our Youth Choral Festival in Darien Connecticut last month, or rehearsing LAB on Saturdays, or visiting numerous Bay Area schools for clinics but we're still hoping he can get rid of that sling soon.)

Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, back to Minnesota – we’re all over the place singing our durable “Love Story.” Yesterday we came from Ames, Iowa via Desmoines and Chicago to New York for a concert at the Metropolitan Museum – home to our cherished Christmas series in the Medieval Sculpture Court. This time we were celebrating the opening of the new American Wing with a concert of American music in the Englehard Court. We started with Mexican Baroque and ended with Ellington,passing by Barber, Sametz, Whitacre, and Paulus, and had the impression that the audience – a lot of whom we recognized from Christmas-seemed to enjoy the change of pace. Tomorrow night we’ll be sleeping in Mars ( Pa.) and performing in Wexford, Pa.

Ben was in Paso Robles last week working with the Paso Robles High School group which will sing music from the California missions before our concert at the Santa Barbara Mission on June 9. LAB will do the same thing before performances at San Francisco, Carmel, Santa Clara, and Fremont. The Paso Robles and LAB choirs are learning the popular villancios which were sung outside of the missions to try to attract more people into the churches. We’re on the road, heading for New York. Our own rehearsals for Mission Road will start May 15, directed by Antoine Plante of Houston’s Mercury Baroque. We’re looking forward to this sunny and beautiful end to our long 11-12 season.

Our intrepid and very active LAB Choir is now in session 6.5.  This group has an extensive program of appearances around Chanticleer's forthcoming Mission Road program.   They'll take time on Sunday  May 6, though, to appear on Bay Area Teen Idol's competition final at the Venetian Room where they'll meet celebrities like Mary Wilson of the Supremes while saluting the teens competing for a trip to New York to further their musical theater/jazz ambitions!   Something completely different!

Tickets are still available at   http://www.bayareacabaret.org.