Contributed by Susan Astington, Chorister
Oriana performed twice on the third weekend of February 2020, on Saturday evening in Toronto and on Sunday afternoon in Elmvale, ON in a collaborative concert with two upper-voice choirs from Simcoe Region, Double Treble and Vox Femina. None of us realized it at the time, but this was to be our final live performance for a long time to come.
The lockdown started while we were taking our usual March Break hiatus, which we extended by a further week to see what would evolve. Everyone remembers the confusion and uncertainty during those early weeks of the pandemic, as we determined whether and how the remainder of the season might proceed. Once it became clear that our in-person season was over, our online get-togethers shifted from contingency planning to checking-in with one another and sharing our tips for what shows and movies to watch, the best online musical performances, and even how to take care of our skin chapped from all that handwashing!
With the arrival of September and no immediately foreseeable return to in-person rehearsing, as a group we made the conscious choice to focus internally on supporting our membership, maintaining our weekly connections with one another and working on growing our musical skill development through “How to Choir” sessions led by artistic director Mitchell and collaborative pianist Ben. These sessions delved more deeply into theory, sightsinging, repertoire analysis and musicianship than we could find time for in a regular season (when our focus is concert preparation), giving us the opportunity to grow the musical capacity of our amateur ensemble.
Through discussions with our members in the fall of 2020, we determined that for our organization, the inherent nature of choral performance requires us to be together sharing our voices in the same space, and so we chose not to perform publicly until it once again was possible for us to sing together reasonably safely. While we were aware and supportive of other choral organizations who opted to mix tracks of their individual singers in recordings to approximate a choral sound, we decided as a group that this performance option did not work for us.
Nonetheless, the importance of our membership community meeting weekly online was paramount for us – several of our members count their tenure in decades, and we are an important musical home for many of our singers. We remained committed to supporting the mental and social health of our membership through the long difficult months of the lockdown, and although our music-making remained very important to us it became necessarily in this virtual context a secondary consideration. If we did not take care of each other as a community of singers while we had to remain apart, we would have had a more difficult time bringing our ensemble back together once that became feasible again. We were certainly open to any new members who chose to join us while we operated virtually but not surprisingly, we found that there was greater interest from potential new members once we returned to in-person activities. As a result, our primary focus during the lockdown was on supporting and engaging with each other over our shared love for and commitment to choral music.