Koleinu gave its year-end concert last Thursday night at Temple Isaiah in Lexington. Here’s a picture from the dress rehearsal —
That’s Carol, our director, on the left in the green sweater. We were accompanied by piano on most of the pieces, and harp, cello, and violin on three pieces in the middle. The ark, containing the torah scrolls, is in the background, decorated with a big star and carvings representing the twelve tribes. Above and in front of it is an unusual tetrahedral eternal light.
I got to the dress rehearsal a little late, thanks to lots of rush hour traffic on a rainy day. I was still very early for the rehearsal, just a little late to help getting the stage set up. However, other people had set it up and found that it was easy; so that was fine. We went late into the evening, because there were lots and lots of rough spots that Carol wanted to go over. I had told Arlene to expect me home after 10, but I don’t think I phoned to say I was on my way until after 10:30.
And here we are in concert garb, getting ourselves set up. There was a curtain in front of the ark for the concert. That’s me just to the right of that curtain, looking to the right.
Near the beginning of the program we did two pieces by a local (or Central Massachusetts, anyway) composer, Karen Tarlow. She spoke for just a minute before we sung them, saying something about the basic building blocks were listening for the rhythym of the text and getting the music to match it and making up a tune that made sense with the text, and that was about it. She smiled and gave the chorus a thumbs up sign after we finished the songs.
We did four songs by Robert Starer of which I really thought three were too hard for the chorus. The last three of them were the ones with violin, cello, and harp. To my surprise, they went smoothly, and of course sounded gorgeous with that instrumentation.
The only real hitch was that the last song had three verses with solos and a rousing chorus after each. The second soloist completely forgot her text and did the whole verse over after getting a copy of the music to read from. Then the third soloist forgot half of his text. At that point we didn’t repeat the verse. It was not really our strongest finish.