Dear all
Firstly, to clarify from last evening, there will be NO REHEARSAL NEXT WEEK on Tuesday 18th Feb due to half term. Our next rehearsal will be on Tuesday 25th Feb. Apologies for confusion!
We spent most of the rehearsal yesterday making great progress with the first of the Rutter Birthday Madrigals. I think this is the hardest of the set and we are already singing it competently, even after only 2 rehearsals! It is the kind of piece that needs to look and sound relaxed – which means we need to know it inside out! We will spend at least some time on this at each rehearsal to make sure we do, and it would be a good idea to have a listen to this at some point over the next fortnight to keep it in your minds.
We also started work on the second of the Birthday Madrigals, which is more straight-forward in terms of notes but does take some putting together, as the parts do clash a lot in places. Early signs are that we will rise to this challenge comfortably!
Finally, we sang through the Rex Tremendae, Confutatis and Lacrimosa of the Mozart. These are sounding very solid and we now need to start putting in the finer touches which make a performance special – dynamics (I will talk about those a lot) and phrasing (singing lines, not individual notes) are the key elements to this, which we will continue to work on.
All best
Dave