Poster for Handel's Messiah
Even without my advent calendar here to countdown the days until Christmas with breakfast chocolate, I’m well aware that the season is coming full speed ahead. Here at Maple Bear, we began prepping for the holidays in mid November. In a few weeks time, we will have our Christmas concert for the kindergarten kids, which is going to be a Big Deal, from what I can see. Since I’m not a kindergarten teacher, I can only hear the hard work going into it echoing through the halls. Nothing says Christmas quite like dozens of 6 year olds screaming lyrics without know what concepts like pitch and tone are. Keep screaming, babies. ♥
Speaking of Christmas concerts, one of the reasons the holidays seem to be rushing upon me like a space shuttle plummeting back to Earth is the fact that I’ll be performing in the Camarata Music Company’s production of Handel’s Messiah. It’s going to be an amazing performance, with an orchestra and professional soloists. The choir is damn good too. I’ll be in the soprano section, helping out with those notes that make people go bug-eyed because they’re ridiculously high sometimes.
This is a clip from last year’s performance. From what we’ve been told, the choir has improved since then. Considering I think this performance sounds REALLY good, I can’t even begin to imagine how we sound (It’s hard to gauge when you’re right in the choir until you hear the recording.)
Anyways, the required details:
Date: December 18th, 2010
Time: Camarata starts at 7:30,. The Seoul International School’s Junior Choir will be performing Christmas carols at 6:45, so the suggested time of arrival is 6:15, since many people will be seeing the junior choir.
Where: Chungdong 1st Methodist Church, Seoul. City Hall station.
Ticket Prices: 15,000 won in advance, 25,000 at the door.
Note: At the rate we’ve been selling tickets, there may be only a limited amount of tickets at the door. If interested in going, give me an email at rebecca at ablogabroad dot com, and we can set up some kind of bank transfer or ticket sale type thing. 
On top of my choir’s performances, it seems that there are events happening every other second this December. The day after my concert, I’ll be hopping over to Japan for a short trip, then working some serious overtime to help out some friends at work. I’ll have the wonderful joy of getting to help the kids with their Christmas concert and do the whole lead up to Christmas. Work has slowly become a perpetual Christmas celebration with my kids, which is amazing.
The week of Christmas itself is going to be complete and total madness. I’ll be going to a concert or musical on Christmas Eve, Christmas, and Boxing Day, and on top of that, I’ll have houseguests the whole time too. I’m so excited, it’s going to be ridiculous.
Randomly, I have totally been to that Methodist Church!
Hope all Christmas and choir preparations and performances go well! Have fun!
The hell? Why were you at Chungdong? I know there’s some kind of palace there, but the church is tucked in way behind it with creepy statues in front of it.
Just saw a sign as I was walking round, and was interested by the idea of a Korean Methodist Church. Just had a quick look at the outside. At least I’m 90% sure it was Chungdong, it rings a bell. As do the creepy statues.