The offstage chorus conducting workstation

The season finale of The Cleveland Orchestra has been full of popular repertoire, and one of the biggest hits this fall was the "HD Planets" with the Houston Symphony music director Hans Graf. "HD Planets" means performing The Planets by Gustav Holst accompanied by a slideshow of NASA space imagery of the very same planets that the music is depicting, and maestro Graf has conducted this show almost twenty times already.

We performed the work to sold out audiences two nights in a row, and I was happy to assist maestro conducting the women of the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus offstage for the final movement, Neptune. In Severance Hall we were situated quite close to the organ loft so keeping in sync with the orchestra was not a big problem. I had video and audio monitors backstage to make it even easier (wonder how they did it in the old times).

Our final performance was in Akron, in a huge auditorium where we were placed in a lobby outside the second balcony. The distance was so long that the delay became something like one eighth of a second. We could not trust at all what we heard from inside the hall because for our sound to reach the audience together with the orchestra we should actually be singing quite a bit ahead. What's the solution in a case like this?

The safest way to synchronize the orchestra with us is of course that the actual conductor follows the chorus after it has started the second entry (the first being just one long note - no problems there). And luckily this is what maestro Graf himself suggested, well understanding the realities offstage. He could have made my life very difficult out there, had he decided so...

The performances went really well, also in Akron, and I really loved working with Hans Graf. From all the guest conductors this fall he was really the most pleasant to work with. And I loved working with the lovely ladies of the chorus as well - they did a marvelous job taking us to the Neptunian orbit. Anyone who knows this chorus part knows it's not easy at all!

We got a couple of nice reviews of the shows, on Plain Dealer and one music blog, and one fellow blogger from the chorus wrote a "snippet" from our Akron concert. Check them out!