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
