Tonight we ate supper at church. A group of high school students is raising money for a summertime mission trip, and each week during Lent, they're serving supper before the Thursday evening church service and accepting a "free will offering" each time. We ate a tasty soup supper before the Ash Wednesday service, and tonight we enjoyed slushburgers and chips.
Both these suppers represented contradictions to what I wrote in sentence two. The pre-Ash Wednesday service supper wasn't on a Thursday, of course, and tonight's supper didn't precede a church service . . . because there was no church service tonight. Instead there was a choir concert, which our family attended.
The first part of the concert was performed by the Chorale and Chamber Singers of Dickinson State University. They just completed a several-day tour of the region ending with tonight's performance "back home." I know many of the students who sang tonight (and have several of them as students), so it was especially fun to hear their solos and to watch them perform with the group.
The second part of the concert was performed by the Madrigal Singers and Concert Choir of North Dakota State University. They! Were! Terrific! NDSU has a large student body from which both music majors and others can audition for the Concert Choir, so the group is larger than DSU's and features many strong voices. They performed challenging arrangements with apparent ease and were impressive in their tight harmonies (and dissonance, when called for by the song), their dynamics, their expressiveness . . . everything one could expect from a choral performance. It was especially fun to watch the conductor's conducting actions, which were expressive themselves and showed full-body energy--she "felt" each song and let it show in the way that she moved her arms and torso and head.
It was a really great night of music, and I'm glad that our daughters could see/hear good vocal performers in action; the choir members were good role models for our own little songbirds!
I actually realized immediately that you stated church was on Thursday. I wondered briefly, why.
ReplyDeleteThe concerts all sound fun. Soon the girls will be involved in these events and you'll be hearing them too!
Hearing such wonderful choirs makes me miss a little bit being in Master Chorale in Grand Forks or singing with the church choir at Calvary. And then I take a quick look at the calendar, realize there simply aren't enough hours in the day, and appreciate being able to listen without being obligated to spend the time to practice!
ReplyDelete