Certainly left the absolute best performance of my choir's history on the stage tonight, celebrating ten years of the choir's existence and nine years of my participation.
It featured a world premiere of a Canadian composer's first-ever musical setting of Victoria, BC's Poet Laureate John Barton's work.
"Inside the Frame" features one of Barton's close friends who after multiple strokes was left bound to a wheelchair on a floor of his home. He was an avid and well known painter in British Columbia.
He painted for four to five hours a day and left a massive body of work behind.
Barton confided in the choir during a rehearsal on Wednesday last week that his wife noted that he painted trains when he was feeling depressed. His last week's works were all trains.
Barton flew in from Victoria on Wednesday to sit in on our rehearsal and watching him experience the music Beatch wrote with his text took me to tears.
Text so personal to him being presented in such a beautiful and honoured way, he said to the choir "These poems have lived with me in silence until today. You've given them life."
The drive home after that rehearsal was wrought with introspection.
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