Dining and singing

You wouldn't believe how much more I've been intending to put in this blog recently, but ...

Between the idea
And the reality
[...]
Between the conception
And the creation
[...]
Falls the Shadow

as T.S. Eliot wrote, the "Shadow" in my case being all my other whims and preoccupations and a lack of self discipline.

I haven't yet recorded anything, for example, about a carol concert I went to on 14th December at the Centretown United Church on Bank Street, a musician called Margaret Stubington directing the Canadian Centennial Choir so well that I felt like signing up for an audition there and then; only apparently I'll have to wait till the end of next summer. A friend and colleague of Chris', Gianluca, sings bass in this choir and he was the one who'd advertised the upcoming performance to us while we were having supper with him, Dan, Maha and Nicola upstairs at a Lebanese family restaurant (Les Grillades) on Holland Avenue, the previous weekend.

Gianluca and Dan had a story to tell us about another restaurant they'd tried, a quite extraordinary one––O. Noir, in Montreal, where you literally cannot see a thing you're eating, with the intention that you begin to perceive food in the way a blind person does. There are restaurants like this in London and in Toronto as well. Gianluca said he kept his eyes open while he had his meal and the only thing he could make out was the tiny red light in the overhead smoke detector. Dan said that after a few minutes at the dark table he simply closed his eyes, and kept them closed. It hadn't felt like sensory deprivation because all their other senses had been on the alert.

To go back to the concert I attended: most of the carols were sung a cappella, but there was one accompanied item, The Twelve Days of Christmas, worth mentioning, in which each "day" was composed in a different musical style. So the partridge in the pear tree was conveyed in plainsong, the two French hens with a medieval pipes and drums sort of accompaniment, and so on. One verse was like a madrigal, another like a Baroque oratorio chorus, another like Wagner, another like a Richard Strauss waltz. The twelfth day was a bombastic American military march. I have lost my programme now so can't remember who wrote this, but it was fun.

Gianluca sings in more than one choir, another being Tone Cluster, also known by its members and friends as quite a queer choir, the singers being gays and lesbians with a sense of humour. To hear what they sound like in rehearsal and see a little clip of their conductor and of Gianluca himself talking about this choir, click here.