A Weekend of Glamour and Music!

It is with great joy that I write these lines today and share my happiness with you. This weekend has been a dream, a gift and an opportunity to recover the love and passion for my career. In this same community I told you three weeks ago that my return to music had been interrupted by the covid, in addition to the mourning, and at that time I enjoyed my group as a spectator, but today I have the joy of returning to the stage and give it all on stage with one of my favorite musical works, the Carmina Burana by Carl Orff.

As I told you in yesterday's post, the meeting point was at the Centro de Acción Social por la Música in Caracas. For those who do not know me, I belong to the tenor line of the Simon Bolivar National Choir, the choral group with the most strength and international projection of both El Sistema and my country Venezuela. I humbly do everything with great passion, especially when it comes to singing, and I have been inactive for a few months for personal reasons, so this concert was very important to me.

We were conducted by Roger Carlsson, a guest Maestro from Switzerland who has been working with my institution for some time. In fact this concert was scheduled for the year 2020, but the pandemic did not allow it at that time and when schedules are so tight, rescheduling usually takes so long. We were also accompanied on the piano by the Spanish Maestro Calio Alfonso, who since last year has worked a lot with our group and we have grown very fond of him. In fact, I was surprised at the beginning of the week when he saw me and expressed his condolences for the death of my father, because I worked with the pianist for only two days in October. It meant a lot to know that someone so important in the music world remembered me and was aware of my family situation.

My group is characterized by having great singers from every corner of Venezuela. We are young people who studied music at a professional level and prepared ourselves in the world of choral and lyrical singing. For some years it has become more common that the soloists of the choral symphonic productions and operas that we perform are members of the same choir, and in this case it was like that. Soprano Katherin Yagua, Countertenor Argenis Salcedo and Baritone Claudio Gonzalez stood out to interpret numbers so difficult for normal singers, including myself, because I have not yet reached that vocal level. We were also accompanied by the Niños Cantores de Venezuela who have an important participation in the work. One of the richest experiences of the evening was that the Simón Bolívar Hall was full, and that is the power of the world's best-known works. The Carmina Burana has an incredible commercial appeal, thanks to its sonority that envelops the spectator from the first measure.

Before and after the concert I met wonderful people. I was able to meet and greet the first Venezuelan actor Javier Vidal, who has been working with the choir for some time now, but who has coincided with my family work in the last few months. I really wanted to meet him because I really admire him and I grew up watching his work on television. We also ran into two great friends from our time in the Maracay core choir, where Jhoxiris and I started this musical adventure more than 10 years ago. Nothing better than sharing this Dios version of Carmina Burana with the people who saw us in diapers when we sang it for the first time in our hometown.

_{Javier Vidal, Actor}

_{Post Show}

On this occasion my mother could not accompany me, although I am still accompanied by the emotion of having shared with her at Easter, but I always had her present, as well as my father, who now has a front row seat for every concert. I am really writing these lines and I feel very happy, because now the pleasant moments are more rare, and the moments that take me away from sadness are worth gold because now it hurts me to smile and pretend that nothing happened, but I also have the strength to move forward that comes from God and definitely sends it to me through music.

These video excerpts were recorded by José Alejandro Rodríguez, one of my fellow tenor row members, and he has authorized me to share them on Hive for the enjoyment of my friends and music lovers. The editing was done with ShotCut. The pictures were captured with my Tecno Pova II and I did not edit them. I hope you liked this post, I send a hug to all of you who followed my publication yesterday and surely you will support me today too...