Category: Choir Updates

A quick reminder for anyone thinking of joining us tomorrow here are the details and how to book. Starts at 10:30 for 11:00, hope to see some of you there. David

Just a reminder of the notice I gave at rehearsal last Tuesday:

The Hammersmith and Fulham Choral Society are having a “come and sing” Brahms’ Requiem on Saturday 5th Feb in St Mary’s Church, High Street, Putney. Many of you will remember that we sang this as a choir in 2014, and may like to relive the moment. You’re also welcome if you haven’t sung it, it’s a magnificent piece.

It starts at 11:00, has 2 rehearsal sessions with a break for lunch and finishes with a full performance. Tickets are £20. Full details are here.

David

Dear all

Many thanks to those who have attended the first 3 rehearsals and apologies for not sending out a note after each one.

We’ve made a great start to the year with some music that is really fun to sing! Rather than go over what we looked at in each rehearsal I thought I’d just give a quick overview of each piece we are looking at so far. There is no guarantee all these pieces will be in a concert in the summer, and we are more than likely to add other pieces as we go.

Gloria (Vivaldi) – this is a super well-known piece that always brings smiles to faces. We have looked at most of the movements in the last two rehearsals and have spent particular time on numbers 2, 5 and 7. Number 2 is probably the most difficult to get right because it is very slow, making it hard to follow at times. Number 5 is difficult for the opposite reason – lots of very fast quaver runs! We have also looked at the first movement (which is already sounding good) and a little bit at number 12.

I mentioned at the second rehearsal that this piece has several solos (minimum 2 sopranos and an alto required) which is would be nice to cast from within the choir if possible. Please have a think about this and let me know if you are interested. There is a lot of time between now and a concert in the summer to work on this.

Festival Te Deum (Vaughan Williams) – this is a nice accompaniment to the Gloria, as another celebratory anthem! It’s actually relatively straight forward for the most part, but needs a lot of energy to keep the sentiment going the whole way through. We spent time on this in the first rehearsal but not since. This is very likely to be in a concert in the Summer. This is a Vaughan Williams anniversary year.

Antiphon from Five Mystical Songs (Vaughan Williams) – we performed this in our last concert before the pandemic in November 2019 and are generally picking it up again quite quickly. It is another celebratory piece needing a lot of energy!

Psalm 100 (Jauchzet Dem Herrn) (Mendelssohn) – this psalm setting (in German) is one of three little motets by Mendelssohn we are looking at at the moment, as this is also his anniversary year. This one is mostly in 4 parts but has an 8-part section in the middle which is designed to be sung by a solo octet, which we will all learn together for now.

Kyrie (Mendelssohn) – this is not from a full mass setting but is a lovely short setting. It’s in a double choir arrangement (8 parts), which is something of an experiment to see how we cope!

Heilig (Sanctus) (Mendelssohn) – this setting of the words of the Sanctus in German is much like the Kyrie in that it is split into 8 parts. Along with the Psalm setting above, it is also good to broaden our language barriers a little!

Looking forward to seeing you all next week!

Dave

Dear All

We are going to make a bulk order for the chosen Vivaldi Score (link to the one we are going to use is copied below) to take advantage of discount.

If you would like to place an order through SGC then please email me directly on jonezfamily658@virginmedia.com or let me know next Tuesday 11^th. Order will be placed after Tuesday’s rehearsal so it arrives in time for the following week.

Dave will delay starting work on the Vivaldi & begin with pieces listed in the earlier message instead.

Link to Vivaldi edition: 

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas break and are looking forward to re-starting rehearsals.

Our first rehearsal will be next Tuesday 11^th January 2022, at Christchurch, 19:45 (SHARP!!!!) – 21:30.

This term’s rehearsal schedule will be as follows:

First rehearsal –                 Tuesday 11^th January 2022

Half term –                          Tuesday 15h February 2022

Last rehearsal –                  Tuesday 22^nd March 2022

The repertoire we will be rehearsing this term will be for the performance at the end of the summer term (date to be advised). Dave has asked us all to bring several pieces of music to the first rehearsal if possible. Pieces listed below with links:

Score for Vivaldi’s Gloria (if you have one, if not they are available from musicroom.com – https://www.musicroom.com/antonio-vivaldi-gloria-rv-589-pa-mixed-choir-and-ba7515 )

3 Pieces by Mendelssohn (2022 is the 175th anniversary of his death). All pieces available online:

Kyrie setting – https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/images/3/33/Mendelssohn-Kyrie.pdf

Heilig (Sanctus setting in German) – https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/images/4/40/Ws-mend-003.pdf

Psalm 100 in German (Jauchzet dem Herrn) – https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/images/9/94/Ws-mend-jau.pdf

2 pieces by Vaughan Williams (2022 is the 150th anniversary of his birth) All pieces available online:

Festival Te Deum – https://petruccimusiclibrary.ca/files/imglnks/caimg/6/63/IMSLP129160-PMLP252274-Vaughan_Williams_-_Festival_Te_Deum_(vocal).pdf

Antiphonal from 5 Mystical Songs (we did this in November 2019) – https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/f/f8/IMSLP31943-PMLP60778-fivemysticalsong00vaug_bw.pdf (this is the full score, Antiphonal is no.5)

Dear All

I hope everyone is looking forward to Tuesday.

As a reminder the timetable for the evening is as follows:

18:45 Meet at Christchurch to prepare altar area for choir (please arrive promptly as it will need all of us to get this done in 15 minutes)

19:00 Short rehearsal

19:30 guests arrive

20:00 performance starts – running time about an hour

Please could everyone bring a bottle and a couple of glasses to enjoy together at the end of the evening –  perhaps ask your guests to do the same.

Running order is as follows:

Once in Royal David’s City (vs 1,2,3,6)

Linden Lea

Turtle Dove

Swansea Town

Soirées de Vienne, No.6 – Schubert/Liszt – Robert Bridge

Away in a manger (vs 1,2,3)

All through the night

Skye Boat Song

Down by the Sally Garden

Danny Boy

Paraphrase on themes from Rigoletto – Verdi/Liszt – Robert Bridge

O Come All Ye Faithful (vs 1,2,6)

Ellan Vannin – suggest printing our extra pages to reduce page turns 

Battle of Jericho

Shenandoah

Hark the Herald Angels Sing (vs 1,2,3)

Hi all

Just a reminder to please bring Carols for Choirs books, if you have them, to tomorrow’s rehearsals (7th December). Either the green or white books are fine.

if you don’t have them, don’t panic! There may be some spares and we can share.

See you there!

Dave

Dear all

Many thanks to those present at tonight’s rehearsal. Unfortunately I feel I must plea again for everyone to come to rehearsals if at all possible. We now only have 2 left before we perform in front of an audience and we are far from ready – if the number of people absent from rehearsals remains as it has done for the last few weeks we will struggle to be ready in time. For the second week running, fewer than half of the tenors and altos were present. We are beyond the stage where this can be accommodated – I am not willing to present an unprepared choir in front of an audience. EVERYONE who intends to sing in the concert on 14th December MUST be present for the remaining rehearsals for it to be feasible.

Those who were present achieved a huge amount. We sang through the entire programme in order (see below) and it was really encouraging to hear how secure we were with the music. However, we need to be far more familiar in order to give convincing performances. Next week we will focus on the pieces we have spent less time on recently.

Running Order (for the concert of December 14th) – feel free to set your music in order for remaining rehearsals:

Linden Lea

Turtle Dove

Swansea Town

All Through the Night

Skye Boat Song

Down by the Sally Gardens

Danny Boy

Ellen Vannin

Battle of Jericho

Shenandoah

On the Day:

Arrive – 6:45pm (or as close as possible)

Rehearsal – 6:45-7:45pm

Concert starts – 8pm

Concert ends – 9pm (approx)

I will send a separate email to those performing in the Holly Lodge concert with details.

Apologies for slightly ranty roundup this week. Thanks and well done again to all those at tonight’s rehearsal – it sounded fantastic in places!

Dave

Dear all

Many thanks to those present for a fantastic rehearsal tonight! We achieved a huge amount, including note-bashing through the final 2 pieces for the concert. My now-usual please for everyone to prioritise attending the remaining rehearsals – we don’t have any more time for note-bashing as we really need to start tidying the pieces for performance now, so if you don;t know the music, learn it in your own time!!

We sang all through Down By the Sally Gardens, which is a reasonably simple 2-part arrangement which we generally found quite comfortable. We need to tidy up breathing/dynamics etc, but this will be a very popular piece in performance!

We then looked at the Skye Boat Song, our Scottish contribution to the UK tour of folk songs. Again, this arrangement is fairly simple and we picked it up quickly, but the simple things need to be really clean and tidy to be effective!

Next we looked at Ellen Vannin, which we have not touched for a few weeks, but was not as rusty as I was worried it might be (in fact, it was rather good). The texture in this piece remains quite thick throughout, which means it can sound a little stodgy – keep the energy up, especially in the middle verse, so it doesn’t sag!

We then looked again at All Through the Night, and I’m pleased that we are now managing the Welsh fairly confidently (at least, that’s how it sounds, so good acting if it isn’t!). Watch me for ends of phrases in this – a lot of them end with consonants (especially ‘s’) which all need to be together or it will sound messy. Keep revising from my transliteration from the email a couple of weeks ago.

Finally, we had a sing through The Turtle Dove, after some brief revision of the middle verses. This is going to sound lovely, but really does need to be a Capella and we dropped pitch a little. It happens in the third verse when we are all singing the words together – keep thinking high!

I will send another message round later this week (work permitting) with more details about both concerts, but we agreed today that for our concert on Tuesday 14th December we would arrive at 6.45, with a view to starting the concert at 8pm and be insisted by 9.

Have a good week!

Dave

Dear All

There are two more (last two!) songs to download for tomorrow’s rehearsal:

‘Down by the Sally Gardens’

& ‘Over the Sea to Skye’

Both pieces may be found under Music and Media Library, Repertoire Outline for Autumn 2020 Concert etc, at the top of the page below Linden Lea and All Through the Night.

Please download and bring them (along with all the other pieces) to tomorrow’s rehearsal.

See you there!