The Flin Flon Community Choir knows what it takes to get to Carnegie Hall, but sadly they know now what it takes to keep them away.
The choir’s planned performance of Carmina Burana at the famed concert venue in New York, planned to take place in April, has been postponed due to worries about the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak.
While the choir had already begun practicing via the web conferencing tool Zoom to both include out-of-town members and allow others to stay home, the show was still slated to go on as recently as the third week of April.
“It was that week from March 16-21,” said Flin Flon Community Choir director Crystal Kolt. “The week prior to that, we were calling almost daily to the company we were dealing with and Carnegie was still hosting shows and concerts.”
New York has become the epicentre for COVID-19 in the United States. Nearly 1,000 people in the state have died from the disease in the month of March alone. More than 60,000 individual positive cases have been reported within New York, more than any other American state. About a third of the cases reported have been reported in New York City.
This year, the choir was set to perform with other choirs from around the world - Singapore, Germany, Australia and other countries were all supposed to be involved, along with vocalists from across Canada.
“I started to get worried when I started hearing about international visitors not being welcome,” Kolt said.
The choir has performed at the hall before, playing at the historic venue in 2016. With the likelihood of returning this year looking slim, Kolt said the choristers’ mood was sombre but not surprised.
“Everybody was disappointed, but we’re all facing the same thing. It wasn’t like it was only us,” said Kolt.
“We’re happy that we hadn’t left Canada and we were safely tucked away in our respective cities. We had people joining us from right across the country. We’re fortunate that we caught it early enough.”
A scheduled performance of Carmina Burana in Flin Flon accompanying the Carnegie Hall show, tentatively scheduled in May, is up in the air. Kolt said the show has not been cancelled and new ideas were being brought up, including adding further songs or even another concert later.
“One of the things we had planned for the concert, whenever we’re able to do that, was to have Carmina Burana but to also have the choir sing pop songs with The Mix,” she said.
“We’ve had some real fun with virtual rehearsals. We ended up purchasing Zoom for rehearsals.”
