It’s always a great moment as a teacher and mentor to be able to celebrate the fruits of our collective labours. Such was the occasion last weekend, when our Laurier students took to the stage with soloists Lucia Cesaroni (Violetta), Andrew Haji (Alfredo) and Hyung Yun (Germont) and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony under the baton of Andrei Feher, with direction by Daniel Isengart. To see the palpable joy on the students’ faces as they sang on the stage of Centre-in-the-Square for the first time, and feel the awe that hearing a professional orchestra playing alongside them inspired, was so gratifying. To bring something like this to full flower involves intensive work over many months of planning, negotiating, organizing, adapting (two of the soloists had to be replaced at short notice), rehearsing, and finally, performing. There’s nothing like witnessing the successful launch of such an endeavour.
As music students, our protegés are pulled in so many directions–their various courses, their extracurricular activities, their jobs, their outside lives. There are so many competing priorities, and not all of them circle around performing careers. For some (most) of them, their experiences at this level have been minimal or non-existent. So to some degree, they don’t know what they’re embarking on, and they don’t know whether they’re going to value it. If Saturday and Sunday’s performances are any indication, though, I’d say that the experience was powerful and transformative for them. To feel the engagement and response of the crowd, to sense the camaraderie of much more experienced colleagues who treated them with kindness and respect–these are the things young artists live for. To be able to create these opportunities for them is a privilege and a gift.
These last three years have been very tough for artists. We have missed connecting with audiences and with one another. For many young musicians, they haven’t even begun to have the kinds of experiences that we older folks knew we were missing. Feeling the community created through a production such as this was like a shot of hope and love. I hope that all of these young singers will remember it always: they reaped the rewards of their hard work. They earned that ovation and felt the love of 2000 people, all connecting with music in the same space. Priceless.