Today marked one of our longest concerts of the trip in one of the largest concert venues I’ve ever performed in! We had free time in the morning so I got coffee and got some work done before having a chicken, noodles, and veggies bowl for lunch later. At about 1:00, we departed for our concert venue. The Daejeon Arts Center’s main Art Hall seats about 1500 people, and the stage felt absolutely massive as well as the building’s exterior. While I don’t know the exact dimensions of the stage or the building, it made the Kentucky Center and Whitney Hall in Louisville feel small in comparison. We had two hours of rehearsal time scheduled in the afternoon before the concert, and our repertoire featured four sets of 3-5 pieces each, resulting in a concert that lasted nearly two hours. Before the concert, we also got to sing happy birthday in the hall to our own Corinne Lonergan (an alto)! We performed everything from memory, and I cannot fully describe how mentally taxing it is to deliver piece after piece in that environment switching between languages, styles, and even formations (for double choir pieces) seamlessly. A concert program that demanding and time-consuming is not for the faint of heart, but the Cardinal Singers were up for the challenge.
A highlight of the concert was our performance of a Korean piece called Ong He Ya. It features a difficult tenor solo that was performed by our own Jackson Scott, and he has done a fabulous job with it the entire tour. In addition to his vocal prowess, he has spent months learning basic Korean and training diction with our graduate students, and that work has more than paid off. The audience would not stop clapping for him after the piece, and he had to bow multiple times before we were able to move on! Another highlight of our concert was Frank Ticheli’s Earth Song. We haven’t performed Earth Song anywhere else on the tour, but we did in Daejeon to fit their requested theming (dealing with global issues such as environmental degradation). The hall was just resonant enough for the clusters in the piece to float through the space without becoming too over-saturated, and despite it being one of our easiest pieces to perform, the audience loved it. The text speaks to the destruction of the earth and of humankind in war and refers to singing as a refuge and source of light. While our languages may be different, I know that our desire for peace and freedom endures across national boundaries, and I like to think that singing music like Earth Song reminds both audiences and singers to keep striving towards that peace and freedom.
After the concert we had free time for the rest of the evening, and I got Korean BBQ at a restaurant close to the hotel. The concert was our only big event today so I don’t have much more to add, but I’ll mention that tomorrow, we head back to Seoul for the remainder of the trip to rehearse for a major orchestral concert where we will perform Haydn’s Nelson Mass and Bruckner’s Te Deum in what should be a thrilling musical conclusion to our tour. Thank you for reading!
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