I’m back to my “regular” life. I have a great life, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that after the glory of singing in the pit with the orchestra; hearing and feeling all of that music swirling around, life just isn’t the same.
It feels surreal, somehow, to be grocery shopping and hanging clothes to dry on the line in the crisp air. I’ve got Mendelssohn tripping through my head.
It’s funny. We, the fairy chorus, only sang about 8 minutes worth of music. Each act is an hour long. We sang about 3/4s of the way through the first act, and the very last piece in the second act. So we were there, in the pit for the whole time. I suppose we could have tried to squeeze by the cellos so that we didn’t have to sit there the whole time, but none of us did. We sat there, in the dark, listening, shifting in our seats, smiling at each other when the dancers above us made a particularly loud clumping sound.
Watching the conductor seemingly make music come out of the tips of his fingers. Trying to figure out the reasoning behind when he would switch from using the baton in his right hand to simply beating time with his left, without the baton. He did it in the same places every night. Did his arm just get tired, or was there some other reason? I’ll never know.
Back by us were two of the four cellos. One of them was a woman, who in the rehearsal room looked pleasant and cheerful, but in the pit, looked like an angel playing. Her concentration was sublime. She looked transported as she played. I have no idea what was going on in her head, but the light from the stand lit her face in such a way as to make her incredibly beautiful.
I’ve got new music to work on. Hayden and Mozart and Bach. None of them are Mendelssohn. I had no idea how attached I’d gotten to the sounds of Mendelssohn. He was not on my bucket list. I didn’t have a particular Mendelssohn piece that I had to sing before I died, or at least I didn’t think I did. But now, I’m glad I was able to do that. I was transported by his music in a way that hasn’t happened to me before. I’m not sure if it was a result of being awash in sound because of being in the tiny space of the pit and literally having the vibrations running amok through the pit before heading up and out, or if it was the music itself. I won’t know until I do another show in a pit with an orchestra, but in the meantime, I’m still blissed out from the experience.
I wish everyone could experience something like that. It’s a little like lying down underneath a piano while some one really good plays beautiful music on the instrument above you.
la la la la, la la la!
