La Fête des Mères

Happy Mother's Day, everyone! Especially those of you who are mothers, with a special shout-out to mine in particular.

These roses were on the table and I photographed them this morning before I left for my choral adventure in La Chaux-de-Fonds. My real mother is overseas and my host mother was away for my host cousin's confirmation today, so it was sort of a motherless day for me, but nevertheless a good one.

To make a long story short, as the cliché goes, I played in an orchestra concert yesterday afternoon in Murten (a benefit concert for Terre des Hommes), then took the train back to Fribourg, took a bus to Marly, arrived a bit late for the pre-concert choir warm-up, then sang Fauré's "Cantique de Jean Racine," followed by the Requiem.

Today we all took a charter bus from our school to La Chaux-de-Fonds for the Écolades, a cultural sort of festival for students in French- and Italian-speaking Switzerland. The concert hall there doesn't look like much but apparently the acoustics are so good that multiple CDs are recorded there. We spent the time before our concert watching another choir sing, going to an artsy sort of museum, and generally walking around in the dismal rain. The concert went extremely well. Maybe it was the acoustics, maybe we were better prepared after having already sung a concert the day before, or maybe it was just a little bit of choral magic, but the sound was terrific. I realized that it's very physically demanding to be in the choir in a concert like this. Normally I would be playing in the orchestra but I sang this time around. It is a challenge to keep a high level of concentration and not move around too much. At the end of the day, I had sore feet and a sore throat.

Musically-inclined people are a nice bunch of folks. This café was on the 14th floor of a building. We took the elevator up and the stairs down. It was a bit dizzying. Below: my iced tea from above!