The Chorale Gets Cute!

The Big Story

By Rick Boettger

 

The climax of the Keys Chorale’s year is next Friday, April 10th at 8:00 PM, this time indoors at the Tennessee Williams Theatre. Our December concert was outside, a free gift from FKCC, and we had between 400-500 attendees. We’ll see how much you love us when we charge the usual $20 for adults, with kids and students cheap or free.

 

Technically, our name at the College is the “Mixed Community Chorus,” and for this concert we are indeed mixing it up. The big news is that the Poinciana Elementary school chorus has a couple of songs with us. Frankly, I’m terrified.

 

“Never follow the cute kid in the program,” is the mantra of performers across cultures. More than following just one cute kid, we are actually supporting an army of cute kids. The Poinciana chorus will be singing the lead on the iconic modern song “Happy” while we seniors will be their backup, singing over and over again the single word, “Happeeeeee-eeeeeeee-hee-eee” a total of 36 times.

Deliriously Creative Professor Cutty has got us bought into this because the concert overall is so deliciously rich for us he could have us do a used car lot jingle if he said “Sing!” We have a jambalaya of old, eight-part-harmony choral masterworks that use 60 mature, dedicated, well-trained voices to create a huge bubble of ethereal vocal grandeur, the kids, a five-man barbershop, a few solos, and upbeat modern songs you’ve heard as solos that rise above in four-part choral harmony.

 

And the grand finale, a 25-minute medley from Les Miserables. We all have had so much glorious fun singing these poignantly moving songs. We even dare to sing the interwoven individual voices. Maybe half of the Chorale gets a “solo” at some point, but with no one being a star: the group, the whole Chorale is the star.

 

Except for those damn kids. After we are their backup singers on Happy, they have another song which is a secret, which makes me even more anxious. They are taught by our grand tenor, Ralph Garcia. Ralph…..is as though Luciano Pavarotti decided to be reincarnated, though still alive, as an elementary school teacher in the Keys. Ralph too is larger than life, with a huge, grand voice that commands the hall with ease.

 

And he has given his great art and passion to our kids, and, through them and the Chorale, to you, to us, to our magical community. He can sing in the high voices of his students, from spending so much time singing with them. (I’m trying to get a lesson from him on the head voice.) He has captivated them, and they will captivate us, the little scene-stealers.

 

One day I was late, and the tenor who usually sits next to Ralph was absent, so I took the chair next to him. I am so glad I record our practices! I have listened repeatedly to us singing the harmonies of the great masterworks together. I am so proud that I could keep my bass line next to his note-perfect, soaring tenor part. I couldn’t do this two years ago. On that day, I believe I became a choralist, not just a bathroom singer with a good voice trying block out the other parts so I could sing my own.

 

Folks, it is easy to find wonderful soloists in this town. Every bar band is a soloist with instrumental backup, and there are a lot of good ones. But the Chorale is something different, something above. A grand vocal symphony of the best instrument God created, the human voice.

 

All the tickets are the same price. Unless you like the nosebleed section, order your tickets today at Keystix. If you missed the December concert and regretted it after hearing about it from your friends, or got there only five minutes early and ended up sitting closer to the parking lot than us, order them raht nah, that is, right now.

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