Hurrah for choral conducting!

For many people, studying conducting automatically means working with an orchestra.
Here are some replies I can always expect when I tell people I study choral conducting: "Choral conducting? That's actually a subject?" or "Choral conducting? Where does one study that?" or even "You can study choral conducting at our school????". Many conductors themselves look down at those who work with choirs rather with orchestras, thinking that's something for amateurs. Of course, it is true that conducting a choir usually means working with amateurs. With only two professional choirs in Finland, choir singers are usually people who have just joined to have some fun with music. Sometimes, their ability to read music is appalling, and sometimes you wonder what on earth they are doing in a choir.
But beyond practising parts, keeping in tune and trying to get some people to open their mouths, there is a fascinating world waiting for anyone who decides to join a choir, or for anyone who decides to study choral conducting.
I am strongly of the opinion that the social life of a choir goes way further than that of the orchestra. While orchestra players usually are people who get paid for playing the right notes at the right time, choir singers are people for whom attending rehearsals is only one part of singing in the choir. Finland has a great deal of very good choirs, and although their singers may be amateurs, the choir itself can certainly reach a professional level.
Working with a choir is working with the music, the text (perhaps the biggest difference between an orchestra and a choir) and with people's emotions. The human voice is the most intimate instrument existing, so conducting singers often means crossing into the musicians' most personal sphere.
However, it will always be that the general cultural public will never be able to appreciate choirs as much as they appreciate orchestras. You could gather some of the best choirs from all over Scandinavia for a week-long festival of a cappella concerts, and still the music critic will choose to visit an organ recital in Lapland. Whenever a choir performs a highly demanding work with an orchestra (such as the B minor mass), the review usually dismisses the subject with a sentence like "The choir made a good job" or "Even the choir was able to create a very emotional atmosphere in the third number of the second part, but, otherwise, sang rather quietly".
Saara made her B exam of choral conducting yesterday. She conducted a whole concert with her own choir (Savolaisen Osakunnan Laulajat) and Audite. Finland now has one more excellent conductor of choirs. Hurrah for that!