From the conductor's perspective...

This tour is going so well!  We've had 3 incredibly different performances so far...

Our first was in Monteverde in a small, rustic church (about the same size as the chapel we sang in at Taft, for those who were there.  Remember Mtn Nights in that space?  Yeah...)  We weren't sure what kind of audience we'd have but we left the doors open and many people trickled in as we were singing.  And most of them stayed, which was even better!  The concert was just under an hour and we performed most of our current repertoire (sans Verdi.)  The audience was so grateful to us!  We attracted many local Monteverdians (?) as well as some American tourists.  Excellent.  

Concert #2 was at the afore-mentioned Pan-American school.  Other people have already described the challenge of the setting so I won't elaborate on that.  Except to say that during our warm up it began to rain.  Very hard.  They were singing the Sanctus and the rain was so loud that I (standing 3 feet away from them) could hardly hear!  Fortunately the rain cleared up in time for the concert and the students in the audience settled down enough that there were few distractions.  I also changed the order of the concert program as we went along... which RCS completely rolled with.  It's so nice to be working with a group that's so flexible!

Concert #3 was in the cultural center in San Jose and, indeed, presented an entirely different set of challenges.  The audience was young-ish (lots of high school students without the watchful eyes of their teachers or parents on them) so they were incredibly chatty through our first piece, Sanctus.  The Van Ness (2nd on the program) captivated them, though, and by the time we got to "...plena est..." in the Victoria, they were hooked.  They were especially impressed by Bianca during "Mata del Anima Sola" and the 'Cliffe Notes.  We officially closed the program with "Amazing Grace" (which is becoming our custom on this tour) but then sang two encores to follow.  So despite their inattentiveness at the beginning, I believe we won them over!

My hope is that with at least 1 of the next 3 concerts we'll have a forgiving enough space to sing the Verdi... 

Next we travel to Puriscal - more adventures in acoustics coming soon!

Pura Vida!

Kat(i)e, La Conductura