Music
Conducting
Conducting
There are two things that I absolutly love, working on a show with my kids at school and being front of a group conducting!
The St. Thomas Youth Choir
A couple of early videos from our tour Scotland in 2013. The first is at the Aberdeen International Youth Festival and the second is in Keith, a small town in the Moray council area in north east Scotland.
Here a couple more recent videos, and they are both "walk in" performances. When we are on tour often we will just happen upon a place and one of the kids will say "We should sing something."
The first video is in the Memorial Chapel of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, east of Quebec City. We had just finished performing in the Basilica itself and we were exploring when we came upon the chapel.
The second is in the ruins of a 12th century castle near Esslingen, Germany. Our host, Wolfram, guided our motorcoach through the countryside to this remote castle perched on the edge of a cliff. Obviously we had to sing! You will hear piano accompaniment in this piece. No, there was not a piano in amongst the ruins. When we travel on tour I always take a Bluetooth speaker with me. On my phone we have accompaniment recordings of our accompanist Graham Adams. This way we can sing any of our material wherever we happen to be even if there isn't a piano. We called this "Graham-in-a-Box". (You will notice the phone in my left hand at one point in the video.)
Some of the best musical moments though are truly unplanned!
Lester B. Pearson School for the Arts
Pearson Singers
The Pearson Singers is our unchanged voice choir. It is an audition group of 80 students from grades 5 to 8. The first video is the same song as was performed by Styc in the castle ruin above, but here is a very different setting.
The second video is "Old Macdonald Had A Farm". The kids thought that I was a little crazy when I told them that we were singing "Old MacDonald", but then they started to learn it. See what you think!
Grade 8's
It is great to be able to show an audience just how capable and self-confident 13 and 14-year-olds can become when you provide onstage opportunities for them!
Grade 8's - Original Show Medley
Sometimes the original show that we write in grade 8 is a drama, and sometimes it incorporates a fair amount of music. In the particular year of this video we worked a number of songs from the musical "Hairspray" into our murder-mystery comedy show.
At the end you'll see a couple of our grads jump in to the performance. They were the people who worked on choreography for this show. It was great to have them back to work with our current students!
Whole School Performance
All of the Pearson videos here are from a performance we do at the beginning of June called Choral Celebration. This end-of-the-year concert has been a tradition since Pearson became a School for the Arts in 1989. At the end of this concert it is a tradition that we do a couple of pieces with the entire school, all 280 students on stage at the same time!
Every now and then we are privileged to be able to welcome a guest artist at one of these concerts. In the first video we welcomed Sarah Smith. Earlier that year my small group, Twelve, had done a performance with Sarah and London Symphonia. One of the songs we performed was her piece, "Angels and Anchors". (Official Video - https://youtu.be/vJyn2FnI0r8) I asked Sarah if she would consider singing with us at the end of the year, and was overjoyed when she said yes! At the beginning of the video you will hear Twelve singing with Sarah, and then when the chorus starts the entire school joins in.
One of the most popular musicals in Canada currently is Come From Away. It opens with an incredible song called "Welcome to the Rock". The kids had a blast preparing for this piece of music, particularly working on their Newfoundland accents!
Twelve
My small group, Twelve, is a select group of kids who work on solo and small groups perfoming. They get to put together a number of the skills they learn at our school together for these performances. In this video they are performing a medley of songs from 2013 to 2018.