Sounds of the Season - 2nd night performance

The concert on the first night went pretty smoothly without any big issues, but the second night was a different story. It started out with one of the cello players (high school age) dropping her cello in the parking lot and it broke. I'm not sure the extent of the damage but I know it was unplayable. Luckily the custodians were able to find a school cello from the orchestra room that she used for the concert.

I'm not sure if it was warmer than normal up on the stage where the choir was, but we had one lady almost pass out at the end of the first group of choir numbers. Luckily she sat down when she started feeling faint and some of the choir members helped her off the stage. Then during the second group of songs, right in the middle of the song, one of the bass singers passed out. He was a big guy standing about halfway up the risers and he just fell straight forward, hit his head on a chair in the front row of the choir and landed flat on his face on the floor. I was sitting just in front of where he landed and I was just playing along during the song when I all of a sudden heard a loud crash. I quickly turned and saw what had happened. Some of the men around him quickly got down to him and turned him over onto his back. He was out cold and his nose and lip were bleeding. He finally came to but he stayed there on the ground with his legs up on the risers until the choir was done with the second group of songs. During this time the bassoon player went over to take a look at him (he is an ear, nose and throat doctor). The guy ended up taking an ambulance to the hospital and he had a broken nose and needed stitches in his lip where his teeth cut into it. The whole time I kept wishing that there was something that I could do to help, but there were plenty of people around him who were in a better position and more able to help him than I was. And like it or not, the performance went on despite what happened.

Apparently the man had made some comment to some other choir members that evening that he wasn't feeling 100%, but he was a soloist in one of the first songs and he had a lot of family members there that night to hear him perform. According to my mom who sings with a women's group led by the same choral director, the man told the director that he is planning on returning next year to sing again! It was definitely a performance that I will not forget. (I asked my mom later if anyone ever passed out while singing with the Mormon Choir of Washington that she sang with for more than 20 years out in the D.C. area and she said no. And their concerts were much longer with no sitting breaks in between.) We also had a lady pass on out the night of the dress rehearsal, but luckily it was when the choir was stepping down off the risers and the people around her managed to catch her before she fell - she kind of slumped down where she was standing.