Dear all
Apologies for taking a week to get the latest roundup to you, but it gives me the chance to remind you that there is no rehearsal tomorrow, Tuesday 15th February as it is half term!
Last week, we spent a fair amount of time on the Festival Te Deum, mainly focusing on the next section we had not looked at before (from Figure 4 on Page 5 to Figure 6 on Page 8). This section was sounding really good once we had bashed through the notes and makes me confident we can give a good rendition of this piece. The trickiest bit is the rhythms between figures 4 and 5 – have a look in your free time to make sure you’re on top of it.
We then sung through movement 2 of the Vivaldi (Et in Terra Pax), which is probably the trickiest movement but we are singing it very well. It has a tendency to speed up (partly my fault) so we need to make sure we keep it steady.
Lastly, we learned the notes for the solo octet section of Mendelssohn’s Psalm 100 setting. Despite the lack of any bass 1s (!) we sang this exceptionally well. We’ll look at it more in coming weeks and, as before, I am hoping that we can have a small octet or hexadectet (I’m going with this for a group of 16 singers) singing this in future.
As I have mentioned a few times, I am hoping to add another piece to the repertoire for a concert in June and I hope to have this sorted by the end of half term. At some point you will receive a link to poll to vote for what we sing with the Vivaldi. Watch this space…
Dave