Author: Siobhan Jones

Morning all. Last rehearsal before the Easter break tonight, 7.45pm sharp AT CHRIST CHURCH.

As last week you need: the two Spanish pieces (Zorongo and Habanera), Brahms’ Geistliches Lied and the Haydn.

See you later!

Morning singers, I hope you enjoyed last night as much as I did. Sometimes the only way to go at a tricky piece is to run at it full tilt and see what happens.

You will be excited to know that we are now half way through our journey towards the summer concert. Things are coming together very well, and the movements or sections of movements that need attention are coming into clear focus. I hope that the hard work of note bashing is starting to pay off and you are becoming able to sing with a little less laser focus on the notes and words, and able to hear and enjoy the music. It is certainly starting to sound very good in many places.

Last night we bounced through a lot of music.

Zorongo – we reviewed the first page, and learned the second (faster) section. Good work picking that up. Basses, be strong and accurate with those off-beat rhythms. We will work with Marta in refining it from here and getting the tempos right.

Nun schwanden (12) – we have not sung this movement much since we looked at in detail at the start of the season. You remember it well, and it is now in tidying up mode. Those entries have to be punchy, strong and bang-on together on the beat. Walk around the house singing Ver – zweif – lung Wut und Schreck – en in metronomic time, to the tune of the first entry (A) and the second (bar 89)!

Geistliches Lied – We learned the middle section, part by part, and I think you have the notes and words solid. And, when we put it together, it really started to sound lovely and Brahmsy. Next week we will devote a block of time to this piece. I want to go into the Easter break feeling that we know the whole thing well enough to start singing it rather than reading it.

Den Herr ist gross (20) – we worked through the first half of the movement up to letter B. You did a nice job with it. The remainder of the piece is similar so we should be able to finish the note learning on this quite quickly. It is a tricky one to rehearse because it will be so different with the soloists on top. If you feel like some home practice, this is definitely a movement to sing along to a recording so you get used to how the choral parts sit underneath the three solo lines.

Vollendet ist (10) – this is one of the biggest and most intricate movements of the whole work. You did a fine job of driving through it, twice. Altos – kudos for refinding your place the first time. It is an important choral skill to be able to rejoin the music if, as can happen, you get a bit lost…. We will devote a chunk of time to solidifying this one in the coming weeks.

Habanera – this is clearly going to be a favourite. I’m not sure if Marta would agree, but to me it sounded beautifully Spanish. If you want to finesse it at home, maybe try getting the words perfect. We were ticked off by Gala for singing the word ‘llores’ with an L when the pronunciation is Yorress. And please, CoraTHon, no Zs. Oh, and it’s a silent H, Abanera, like Arry Kane or Arry Redknapp. We will be singing this with Spaniards all around us and we don’t want to offend.

Stimmt an die Saiten (20) – We worked part by part up to letter C. We have sung all the way to the end in the past, so we will look at the second half in a few weeks and should be able to sing it all through with accuracy.

Some logistics stuff:
Next week is the last rehearsal before the Easter break. We MAY be going to Tower House rather than Christ Church, so please stay in touch and read your emails.
Siobhan mentioned the planning meeting on Tuesday 28th. If you would like to be a part of that (all welcome but no obligation), drop Siobhan a note, and bring your ideas on what/when/where the choir should sing the next couple of concerts.
We have begun the process of sourcing soloists (thank you, Caroline Cuss for leading that) and once that is done the orchestra will be put together. David Corless is starting work on concert publicity.
We are off Tuesday March 28 – Tuesday April 11. The first rehearsal back after Easter is Tuesday April 18.

Have a good week

Chris

Morning everyone, I am hoping to get through a wide range of repertoire this evening, including the one movement of the Haydn that we have not looked at yet. Nothing new to print today if you were at last week’s rehearsal, but please make sure you have the downloads we have previously used in addition to your copy of the Creation. Those downloads are here: Brahms’ Geistliches Lied, Zorongo & Habanera. (If you want to print Laudate Dominum go ahead, but we won’t use it tonight.)

I’d love to start bang on time, so please try to be there for 7.45 if you possibly can. Look forward to seeing you all.

Chris

Dear All

As you know Sheen Gate Choir is run by a committee of volunteers and all members are welcome to get involved as much or as little as they like in the running of the choir. Most people prefer to just come along and sing which is great (& the whole point of the choir!) but we periodically remind members that should anyone wish to get more involved they’d be very welcome. 

There’ll be plenty of extra things to organise on the run up to our concert – programme, tickets, bar etc.  – and we’re always grateful for help with these (more on that to follow).  In addition we’re going to be holding a choir planning meeting at the start of the Easter holidays –Tuesday  28^th March 19:30 – where we’ll look ahead to 2023-24 and discuss dates for concerts and what pieces we’ll perform. If anyone is interested in coming along please let Siobhan Jones know by emailing jonezfamily658@virginmedia.com

See you at all tomorrow

Morning all, hope you are enjoying the snow.

At last night’s rehearsal, we ended up the evening talking about the amended concert plan. For those who were not there, most of the plan remains exactly as was. The main event is the Haydn Creation. The significant change is the date, from Sat July 1 to Sat Jun 24. This is to allow us to perform jointly with Ad Libitum, the choir from Spain which Marta leads. The proposed concert program is on the website. We will be doing most of the concert just as SGC, with orchestra and soloists as before. Ad Libitum will be performing a block of Spanish music, and we will be performing a few items together. They will be around 20 singers; I’d hope that we would be a little more than that, so combined we could be 50-strong. We have secured the services of an excellent conductor, Stephen Hall OBE, musical director of the Civil Service Choir, to conduct us in the Haydn and possibly other pieces. He will be coming to a couple of rehearsals in the run up to the concert to get to know us. If you have any questions, comments or concerns about the concert, please speak to myself, Siobhan or Lesley.

So to last night’s rehearsal. We kicked off with a look at Zorongo, the one unaccompanied piece in this concert. The piece is a little introduction, a slow first bit, then a lively second bit. We learned the intro and the slow bit last night. Good job picking that up. The quick bit we will learn next time.

We then turned to movement 4 of the Creation, Mit Staunen. We had not sung this together before, but your work in sections has clearly paid off. We put this relatively simple movement together quite nicely from the off. Pronunciation note – there are several words with the o-umlaut: ertont, schopfers (I can’t add the umlaut in the post). This is an UR sound not an English O. air-turnt, shurpfers.

Movement 13, Die Himmel, starts quite easy, up to letter C. But from there on, each part has its own challenges: entries, rhythmic changes, key changes. We spent a chunk of time on this long section. Nice work getting this largely figured out, we will keep on refining and solidifying this one.

Geistliches Lied is a bit of a struggle so far. I can sense that many of you have not yet discovered the mysterious beauty of this piece. Please persevere! When you have the notes learned, it will start to fit together and it will make much more sense. We spent longer than intended going back over the first section, so we didn’t do as much on the new middle bit. I will make some practice tracks for this piece and get them up on the website, so you can work on the notes at home if you like to.

We rather ran out of time, so our look at Habanera de Don Gil de Alcala was a poorly-accompanied hack through just to get a sense of how it goes. I think you found this a fun example of the Spanish element that Ad Libitum’s presence will bring to the concert.

So now we have the plan fully laid out, and while the concert might seem well in the future, in fact we have only 11 rehearsals left, and plenty still to learn.

Robert, we missed you and wish you a speedy recovery.

See you all next week

Chris

Hello everyone, I hope you are having a good weekend. Thanks to all for their help with the sectional rehearsals last week.

As you will have seen, we have decided to rejig the concert plan slightly, to make it possible for us to sing with Ad Libitum, a choir from Merida in Spain, whose leader is our own soprano, Marta. At the end of the rehearsal on Tuesday, we will dedicate some time for anyone who wants to ask any questions about details or reasons behind the plans we have made.

In the meantime, some new music to print off, please. I have created a new sub-page on the website for the summer concert, in the Media and Downloads section. If you could, please bring Zorongo and Habanera de Don Gil along. It would be great if you have time to listen to them so you have an idea of what we are working on – YouTube links are there. If you didn’t have the Brahms already, you will need that too.

I hope you are as excited as I am to learn a completely new style of music!

See you on Tuesday

Chris

Dear All

Thank you for responding so quickly to our query about concert dates. Responses were overwhelmingly in favour of the earlier date. We have therefore taken the decision to move our concert to Saturday 24^th June, with apologies to those who are unable to make the new date.

The June date will allow us to add what I hope you agree will be a fun and exciting element to our concert. Marta’s (sop) choir will be visiting London from Spain that week and we thought it would be a lovely idea to invite them to sing something at our concert. This would be in addition to The Creation and Brahms pieces we have been working on. Details have still to be worked out but we will hopefully have chance to hear them sing one of their traditional Spanish songs as well as singing some pieces with them. More details to follow.

Reminder that we will be having sectionals this week (28/2). Hosts/Venues are as follows:

Sopranos – at Caroline Cuss’s

Altos – at Siobhan Jones’s

Tenors and Basses – at Christchurch WITH ROBERT! 

See you back at Christchurch next week 7/3

Morning all, nice to see many of you back in singing mood last night.

We started out (after a bit of Australian rounding – try getting that earworm out of your head) with a new piece – Geistliches Lied by Brahms. A choir like us does not often get to sing Brahms. Most of his choral writing is for a big group, and much is for big choir AND big orchestra. But saying all of Brahms is out of our reach is such a shame as he wrote for choir like he wrote for orchestra – lovely big sweeping phrases and those lush harmonies. If you have not listened to it, please do – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNHGslY5ic0 – those who found it a bit turgid last night will hopefully hear how it sounds when put together and with bucketloads of expression. Last night we just worked on the first section, which repeats with different words as the third section. The second section is a little darker and trickier. The final Amen coda won’t take a lot of learning. The sheet music (available out of copyright for printing off) is on the download section of the website. There was some discussion among the German speakers about the strangeness of the words. They are from the 17th-century German poet Paul Fleming, so probably bear the same relationship to modern German as Shakespeare does to today’s English. But they are correct in the music.

For our work on the Creation, we took a close look at 3 movements:

1	7	Im Anfange schuf Gott Himmel und Erde
2	12	Nun schwanden vor dem heiligen Strahle
4	22	Mit Staunen sieht das Wunderwerk
10	38	Stimmt an die Saiten
13	47	Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes	We worked from the beginning to letter C. There is nothing terribly tricky in this piece, all of the musical progressions are pretty predictable and logical, so it’s about being spot on with detail. Pronunciation – erzählen is er-TSAY-lun and Hände is HEN-duh. Let’s not get into the habit of saying these wrong from the off or it will be hard to correct.
18	76	Der Herr ist groß in seiner Macht
27	107	Vollendet ist das große Werk	We slogged hard through just six lines of music – up to letter C – and you did a great job of getting the parts solid and able to be slotted together. Bars 25-30 are where it gets quite chromatic. The tenors especially have some unexpected note sequences. It’s worth listening to this movement if you have time to get used to how it moves and flows.
29	116	Von deiner Güt, o Herr und Gott / Gesegnet sei des Herren Macht	This is one of the ‘easiest’ movements in terms of note learning and structure. You have the notes fine. We will dip back into this one now and again just to focus on being exactly together.
33	151	Singt dem Herren alle Stimmen!

It is hard work going through movements note-by-note like this. Thank you all for your dedication and perseverance as we do. A few more weeks of this and then it will all start to fit together and the singing will become much more fun, I promise. Please keep coming along so that we all know the notes and avoid needing to go back over the same bits. That would be really quite a drag.

Next week I have a family commitment so cannot be at rehearsal. Apologies. Please watch out for messages from your section leaders regarding alternate arrangements which will most likely be separate upper- and lower-parts groups. Thanks to those organising and hosting.

Have a good week, especially Katrina who is recovering from a fall from her bike. Get well soon.

Chris

Most of you already know that some of the choir will be traveling to Austria this summer, to take part in a group sing of the Haydn Creation with choirs from all around the world. But given we have some new members and some changes in the situation, I wanted to update you.

If anyone is interested in coming that has not already signed up, we may have ability to add up to three more travelers. They could be singers or they could be partners or family who just want to join us. Please see me after rehearsal, or drop me an email if you would like to discuss. Dates are Thursday July 6 to Sunday July 9th.

Chris

Hello everyone, I hope you have had a good half term. We are back at Christ Church this week, and with a new piece to pick up – and in a rather different style to the Haydn we have been doing well with. Brahms wrote his Geistliches Lied as a study in writing counterpoint. For something written primarily for composition practice, it is rather lovely. Please print off a copy and bring along this week [link], with the Haydn score of course. If you have time to listen to it through, this is the arrangement I’d suggest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i5NH7LYu1Q

And for a blast from the past, please look through your files for the Voyagers’ Chorus from Idomeneo. If you can’t find it or were not with us when we sang it in June 2019, you can print if off here: https://sheengatechoir.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Voyagers-chorus.pdf

See you tomorrow

Chris