I could have made life easy for myself and put on a regular concert with just myself and a pianist. But no! Instead I chose to have 5 pianists, a conductor, two violinists, an accordionist, a percussionist and 18 singers or so, performing repertoire from the early 1800’s to the present day in a dozen different configurations. And as someone said to me on the day when I expressed exactly this thought, “but then it wouldn’t have been you”. True enough.
This concert was meant to be an encapsulation of the past almost-24 years of my singing-teaching life at Laurier. As such it brought together a group of beloved colleagues and students past and present, all of whom represented different stages of my working life. They brought to life important career episodes–my concert with mentor and friend Frederica von Stade in 2003; my (and Laurier’s!) association with Maureen Forrester; my work with the Penderecki String Quartet; collaborations with colleagues Leslie De’Ath, Leslie Fagan and Elvera Froese; and dear friends and collaborators Mary Vetere, Kate Carver, Peter Tiefenbach and Anna Ronai. It also drew out my relationships to beloved former students as they related to other events in my singing self, and to cap it all off, I was accompanied in chorus by a bevy of former and current students. Solos by Jessica Lalonde (from my very first student cohort and my last–as a Master’s student!) and Xander Bechard made the whole thing that much more special. They are just two of the many students who have gone on to exciting careers that took them to places unimagined during their time at Laurier. And how wonderfully they sang! Thrilling.
My final solo was a song new to me, and it was a risk to present it. Not only was it exposed in a personal way (it is sung from the perspective of a person who has died and returns to remind everyone she loves that she will never truly be gone), but in a vocal way. I spent many hours working on my belt mix and speech-based singing with a trusted colleague, and it felt pretty raw and vulnerable to be doing that in a setting like this where it felt like the stakes were so high. And yet, as I said in my closing words, “do something every day that scares you”. Even though I might not have said it exactly like that in earlier times (they were words my beloved friend and former Dean, the late Glen Carruthers said to me on more than one occasion), this is certainly something I think I have lived by, both as singer and as educator. Modelling it for my students in this instance just felt like the right thing to do.
To all my colleagues, students and friends, they know (I think) just how very much their contribution meant to me. But to have them all together (there are so many who were unable to be there, but their presence was felt nonetheless) on that stage with me was one of the highlights of my life for sure. Anytime you laugh, anytime you sing, for anything: I am there.