Whether she’s belting out 500-year-old madrigals or Broadway show tunes, time stops for a moment whenever Enid Best sings with the Red Deer Chamber Singers.
“Personally, it transports me. It gets me through the bad times and enhances the good times,” said the retired school music teacher. “Whenever you’re playing or singing, you can’t think of anything else . . .
“I can’t imagine life without it,” added Best who has been with the 20-member group since the mid-1990s.
But the Red Deer Chamber Singers have actually been around much longer than that.
The group was formed 35-years ago by former conductor Sadie Braun, who agreed that singing is “good therapy.”
Braun worked as a nurse, moonlighted as a piano instructor and was raising a family with her salesman husband in Red Deer when she decided in 1976 to start a chamber singing group.
Braun had been involved with the local Waskasoo female barbershop quartet, and had always enjoyed singing since growing up in a musical family on a farm near Altona, Man.
The trouble was, she was usually relegated to the role of accompanist, because of her proficiency at the piano.
Braun did get to sing with the Red Deer Chamber Singers initially. She then continued for a long time in the conductor’s role, for which she’s remembered for setting high standards without scaring singers away. “No one left with hurt feelings,” said Best.
Braun only stepped down from leading the group about four years ago.
As fate would have it, she still accompanies the chamber singers on the piano at the age of nearly 90 — but she’s now laughingly resigned to the role.
“I always had lots of choral ideas from always accompanying, “ said Braun, who feels she got an unofficial education in conducting a choir through her work as a pianist.
The group, now led by Braun’s daughter, Sharon Braun (who teaches singing at Red Deer College), developed a diverse musical repertoire over the years that stretches from the 16th-century to the present.
But whether the male and female members are crooning melodies from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera or performing Pastime with Good Company, a ditty written by Henry VIII, they enjoy the challenge and the camaraderie.
Group member Ruth Galarneau, who worked as a physiotherapist at Red Deer hospital, believes a feel-good chemical actually floods your system when you sing, similar to the stress and pain relieving endorphins that are released by exercise.
While Galarneau has always loved crooning, she admitted she was never brave enough to pursue it professionally.
But when she moved to Red Deer in 1998, one of the first things she did was inquire about local singing groups, and was directed to Braun.
Now she doesn’t just get to sing, Galarneau also gets to stretch her creativity behind the sewing machine by creating versions of Renaissance fashions to wear while performing annually at the singers’ Renaissance Feast.
At Christmas time, group members don farthingales, doublets and pointy-toed shoes to sing accompanied by musicians on recorders or lutes.
They perform for anachronistically inclined audience members who have come from as far as Montana.
Braun recalled that one guy from Edmonton’s Living Backwards Medieval Society (which is building a “castle” near Redwater) called the last Renaissance Feast by the Red Deer Chamber Singers the best he’d seen.
“I thought that was a real feather in our cap,” she added.
The chamber singers made such an impression on Best during an early Renaissance Feast she attended that she immediately asked about joining the group.
New members are asked to drop by Tuesday night rehearsals at Sunnybrook United Church, where the singers practise weekly from 7 to 9:30 p.m. There are no auditions, but Best said most people figure out within a few weeks whether chamber singing is for them.
If it is, they will be gearing up for the spring concert at 2:30 p.m. on May 27 at the First Christian Reformed Church. The group sing for donations towards their Red Deer College scholarship, which annually gives a promising young singer or pianist $500 for their studies.
Braun is pleased to be performing the concert with four of her best former piano students, Keith Molberg, David Ho, Morgan McKee, and Nathan Hamilton.
For more information, please call 347-5166.
lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com