Eric Whitacre

I’m finally getting a chance to write about the week I spent in Montreal. What a city! The people are filled with such warmth and gentleness, extremely kind and full of light and life. And the food rocked.

I worked the entire week with the excellent College Vocal de Laval, rehearsing and fine-tuning a lot of my music. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. They had initially prepared sixteen of my works – over two hours of solid music. We chose ten of our favorites and presented those at the concert, including the Canadian premieres of Sleep My Child and Animal Crackers Vol. II.

Here’s a picture of the singers and I doing a ‘crazy picture’ immediately following the concert. With this pose I feel I am dangerously close to being featured on one of my favorite websites, HotChicksWithDouchebags.com:

The concert was one of the most incredible and surreal live performances I’ve ever been a part of. The house was packed, the choir sounded great, but the weather outside was truly unreal: thunderstorms, wind, even a mini-tornado that knocked huge branches off a tree and damaged cars. You could hear all of this during the performance, and it added a primal, mystical feel to an already mystical concert.

A fan posted this video of our performance of Lux Aurumque. Listen towards the end as the thunder is pounding outside, and then, as I give the final cutoff, all of the power in the church goes out for a moment. The audience actually gasps:

Truly, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and it just deepened my love for Montreal and the Loto-Quebec World Choral Festival. Can’t WAIT to get back. And my deepest thanks to maestro Gregory Charles for inviting me to be a part of his festival. Gregory is a superstar in the French-speaking world (like, Celine Dion big) and he simply couldn’t have been more gracious and supportive to me and my family.

Ah, Laval: je ne sais pas comment vous remercier.