NORWICH – After spending a year preparing and fundraising for a trip to the musical mecca of Prague and its annual Choral Festival, a group of eight Norwich High School students and members of the Madrigals Singers and Choir have returned home.
The approximately 10,000-mile round trip was a huge success, according to NHS Music Director Mary Mayo, who said her students – as well as she, herself – have been forever changed by the experience.
“It’s hard to put into words,” said Mayo. “As an educator, this two week experience was extremely valuable. As a human being, the energy I gathered from those two weeks is going to stay with me for a lifetime. Music touches you in a place that you can’t always explain in words; it takes you to a place that no other activity can take you. It was electrifying, just electrifying.”
The group of students – which included Amanda Caulfield, Josh Mahannah, Megan Reynolds, Sean Sheldon, Tambria Schroeder, Dillon Smith, Joshua Seeley and Brooke Bonney – spent two weeks in the “City of a Hundred Spires,” performing side-by-side with professional choirs from Siberia, Russia and the Czech Republic, as well as American high school, college and community choirs. All told, there were 280 vocalists – hailing from seven different countries from across the globe – involved in the choir, reported Mayo.
Participating in a number of clinics, musical workshops and concerts, the assembled group’s first week in the Czech Republic culminated with a performance in the Smetana Hall, located in Prague’s famed Municipal House. The concert easily sold out, said Mayo, and extra seating had to be arranged for the over 1,500 people who attended for renditions of Mozart’s “Requiem” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms.” The performance itself went extremely well, she added, and the ensemble received standing ovations throughout the evening.
Working with some of the world’s finest choral conductors, Dr. André Thomas, Dr. Anton Armstrong and Dr. Raymond Wise, said Mayo, was a priceless, once in a lifetime opportunity for her students. And where language barriers and cultural differences may have otherwise posed a problem, soon-to-be NHS sophomore Brooke Bonney said that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Music is a universal language and I think it really brought everyone together,” she added. “We were definitely unified as a group. It was joyful and the energy level was high.”
While the students’ first week in Prague focused more on the classical side, musically speaking, week two’s focus shifted to the genre of gospel. Considering the fact that – over the last ten years – there’s only been five gospel choirs in existence in the Czech Republic, said Mayo, made that performance stand out on its own.
“The gospel style is not widely known in Prague, it’s in its infancy there,” she added. “The fact that the hall was sold out, people came to see the program and that we were able to bring this to that country is very significant.”
According to Josh Mahannah, who’ll enter his senior year at NHS in September, the trip was not only a musical learning experience, it was a cultural one as well. Daily visits into the city and the opportunity those visits provided to “dip ourselves into the European culture,” he said, helped the students to “build a cultural understanding,” something he had never experienced before.
According to Josh’s grandmother, Betsy Mahannah, this “truly was a once in a lifetime opportunity, full of fun, learning and offering the students a chance to enjoy a life-changing experience.”
As far as the trip’s emotional impact, a visit to the Terezin Concentration Camp, just outside of the city, proved to be both sobering and enlightening, said Bonney.
“It was very powerful, really. It was a gorgeous day, there were birds singing, but the air was heavy. You could feel this energy there,” she added. “I took a picture of this ladder that was used to get in and out of a bunk bed and you could see the indentations worn into the wood. That’s when it hit me, that people had lived and died here.”
Used as a way station for thousands of Jews, Terezin was idealized by Hitler as a city built to protect the people. A propaganda film, created by the Nazis, succeeded in fooling most of the world for years as to the location’s true purpose.
The experience, however, only added to the value and meaning of the students’ trip to Prague, said Mayo.
“Our message from our conductors, both weeks, was ‘we are one, we are one and the same,’” stated Mayo, who added that – culturally, educationally, emotionally and musically – the journey was an excellent one all around for this group of talented students. “To me, that we were together in this country, bringing this wonderful music and these united voices, felt like a step towards peace, towards unity. It was very powerful.”