Choirs should travel. This week, I’m making a list of the reasons why.
The spaces.
I love our home auditorium, and I love many of the spaces we get to sing in with out choir, week to week. Any space is an opportunity to share what we love, after all.
But the spaces you get to perform in during a well-planned choir tour are generally on another level.
I will never forget the first performance we gave on our first tour of Europe with the Rockford Choirs in 2014. At St. Nicholas Church in Prague, we experienced for the first time the 8-second reverb that would be common across most of our performances. To sing Baroque and Renaissance music in the kind of space that inspired that music is awe-inspiring and moving. You begin to understand the music on a deeper level, when you sing it in the right space. You see the architecture of the piece reflected in the architecture around you.
Another tour, we sang in the Pantheon of Rome. This structure, 2,000 years old, has been home to countless hours of music. To sing there was to become intertwined with the history of this famous structure.
Choir tours are the best way to really experience these spaces in an authentic way.