This is Spring Break?

Greg just mentioned that he has no classes this week because it's Spring Break. I razzed him about going down to Daytona Beach and getting hammered for a week, but the longer winter lingers in this latitude, the better that sounds. Maybe I should take a Spring Break!

He'll be working fairly hard all week, anyway. He has multiple tasks going at once, including orchestrating his new tone poem, working on a new fugue that simply suggested itself one day last week, and practicing the organ pieces he'll be playing at the Easter service. He just bought a pedal board, which he can plug into my Casio keyboard to produce a fairly good facsimile of a church organ.

Tell a Secret, Telegraph

The President of our chorus's Board of Directors mentioned that some confidential information was leaked outside of last month's Board meeting. Considering the nature of the information, I can't say as I'm surprised -- it's the kind of information that would get around anyway, and the fact that it's confidential only helps spice it up that much more.

Our director has decided that she'd like to work with a smaller, elite group of auditioned singers, and wants to leave the large, un-auditioned chorus to another director. The new director is someone we've all worked with before, and whom we like very much. Folks are worried that this will be perceived as "our director only wants to work with the good singers, and they're her favorites anyway." Whether or not that's true is really immaterial; she's been in need of a change for a while, and says she just doesn't have another concert program left to create for us. (That certainly explains the painfully unimaginative Christmas concert program last year.)

It's really a good move, in the long view. Not only will the new director give us a new focus and some much-needed musical discipline, but the smaller group will be able to perform in places where the whole chorus just wouldn't fit. We get many requests from other organizations to perform smaller, more intimate concerts, and such a group would answer that need quite well. Sure, it's a group that I personally will never be able to join (as I have much more enthusiasm than I do talent as a singer), but anyone who wants to audition certainly may.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether the "news leak" forces our director to state her intentions sooner than she was planning to. The excrement will probably hit the rotating blades of the air flow device at the board meeting this week, too.

From the Netflix Queue

We watched at least half of Kristin Lavransdatter last night. It's a Norwegian production, directed by Liv Ullmann (okay, she's a Swede). Apparently when this movie first came out in the cinemas, half the population of Norway turned out to see it. The movie is based on the first book in the series of the same name, by an author whose name escapes me at the moment. That's embarrassing, as I read most of the books 20-25 years ago.

The movie chronicles Kristin's life as she grows up in medieval Norway, with all of the splendor of the Norse civilization mixed with the wracking guilt of the medieval church, and belief in the little people. Her parents have arranged a marriage for her with the son of another nobleman. She likes the son well enough, but then, while staying at a local convent, falls in love with a knight who had once been described to her by a healer who had once cared for her sister after the sister was injured in an accident (the healer is the knight's kinswoman).

We haven't finished the movie yet -- it's 3 hours long -- but the photography is stunning, and so is the Norwegian scenery. The film is in Norwegian with subtitles. Greg speaks a little Danish, and Norway was a suburb of Denmark for many years. He keeps picking up the occasional Norwegian word that sounds the same in Danish.