Back to Music, Part 2: I audition

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Me, singing "Ev'ry Valley Shall be Exalted" for conductor Christopher Shepard

In the end I felt like an idiot. I was nervous before the audition, all the old audition scenarios--some I'd actually experienced in some form--running through my head:

-- I'll botch every measure of this aria
-- I'll look like an idiot doing it
-- Everything is awful and everything will hurt

The list is actually much longer than the above, but it's not worth bothering.

I got there early and was welcomed by some of the chorus's stalwart members, setting up for coffee time, which would come mid-rehearsal later. I sat nervously mulling over my music until the conductor arrived and his friendliness and energy immediately put me at ease.

We chatted for a minute about why the hell a guy with a vocal resume like mine (which I haven't gone through in detail here, but it's not that shabby) would want to go back to doing chorus work. And I told him in short form much of what I wrote here.

Without further preamble, I sang the opening tenor aria from Handel's Messiah, minus the recitative, in a big empty room with the conductor accompanying me on a slightly out-of-tune Baby Grand.

As you can hear if you play the sound file above, there are a couple of goofs (I enter too early at one point; he hits a sour note later) and to my own hypercritical ear I sound inelegant, but nothing truly shitty happened and everything went fine. Went well, even.

That was why I felt like an idiot, when the night was done. I was just being a ninny.

I even made it through the whole 2 hours and change of sight-reading Broadway choral arrangements with my voice intact.

Maybe I have a clue as to what I'm doing when I sing, after all.