We just finished the first weekend of "Chansons d'Amour:  April in Paris," the newest Chicago a cappella program.  I must say I'm very happy with the program and how it all turned out.  If you haven't ever heard the Poulenc Huit chansons françaises (Eight French songs), mostly based on 16th-century and other traditional tunes, they're worth the whole admission price on their own.  What a fabulous cycle!  Poulenc is amazing.
 
But I don't want to dwell on Poulenc -- rather, on what it takes to deliver the 16th-century chanson in a convincing manner.  This is harder than it looks.  Replicating the notes on the page is necessary but not sufficient for a great performance. 
 
So I've been thinking about this a little and have a few thoughts to offer. 
 

One learns new things every day.  In preparing program notes for our upcoming Chicago a cappella program, April in Paris, I learned something surprising.  I had already known that the justly famous Trois Chansons by Debussy are settings of texts by Charles d’Orleans.  Who was this Charles?  Well, I have blissfully assumed for about 25 years that, because so many of the texts set by the Impressionist composers were written by their contemporaries, such as Paul Verlaine and Mallarmé, then of course this Charles would have been just another one of the guys on the Parisian scene, albeit one who called himself by a rather lofty name.

This blog entry is from guest writer Bill Flowers, board member and immediate past board president of Chicago a cappella.  He is writing of the recent "Abundance" concert by Chicago a cappella, which will be repeated February 20th in downtown Chicago and Feb. 21st in Evanston.  Bill is an avid fan of both Chicago a cappella and the Count Basie Band -- this is an account of a sort of battle of the bands in his life last weekend!
 
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Bill writes:
 

This week I was in Washington DC and decided that I wanted to have a morning prayer service to start my day.  After a Google search, I settled upon going to the Adas Israel synagogue, which was a short Metro ride from my hotel.  Now, mind you, I grew up Reform Jewish, where there was no morning weekday prayer... that was a "Conservative" thing to do.  But the older I get, the more curious I am about liturgy, and the more I am interested in what happens every day.   About a month ago I started becoming more familiar with the daily evening and morning services.  There are prayers in there that you never see on typical weekdays or the high holidays.  They are wonderful.

The world got really small last weekend.

Event One:  After Chicago a cappella's Thursday concert at Fourth Pres downtown, we had a coffee-and-cookie reception.  One of the songs on our concert was the now-famous Spanish carol, "Riu riu chiu."  One of our sopranos, Kathryn Kamp, had been speaking at our reception with one of the people in the audience.  She came over and told me that he was from Sweden.   I bopped over and greeted him with my limited Swedish, which perked him right up.   Imagine my surprise when this kindly gentleman, in perfect English, told me that:  (a) he lived in Uppsala, home of the famous manuscript in which "Riu, riu chiu" appears;  (b) he had sung in Sweden with Håkan Parkman, the composer who wrote "My love is as a fever" and "Madrigal [Take, o take those lips away]," both songs that Chicago a cappella had recorded on our Shakespeare CD (our first on Cedille Records);  (c) he had made a point of collecting CDs of groups who had done Parkman's works after the composer died in 1988, so he had bought ours;  (d) he was coming to Chicago for a professional conference and went to our website to see what might be fun to do; and (e) found out we were singing right near his hotel, so along he came to the concert;  (f) he said we were better in concert than he had expected!   Wow.