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Hi all, The scores have arrived! Thank you, Tricia. So tonight everyone (hopefully) should have music to sing from. So no need for wholesale printing.

But iff you could, please print off a copy of this for us to end rehearsal with:

https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/images/9/9e/JesuJoyVs1EOSATB.pdf

See you shortly

Fantastic job tonight, singers. This was rehearsal 4 and already you are have learned the bulk of the notes of around half of the chorus works. Still plenty of refinement to do, for sure, but extremely encouraging. Thank you all for your hard work. Note bashing is never a whole lot of fun, but tonight was excellent. Special shout out to our two new singers and young Des, and to Gareth, the one-man bass section.

This is the listing of the chorus movements:

1	7	Im Anfange schuf Gott Himmel und Erde	Recitative & Chorus
2	12	Nun schwanden vor dem heiligen Strahle	Aria & Chorus
4	22	Mit Staunen sieht das Wunderwerk	Solo with chorus
10	38	Stimmt an die Saiten	Chorus
13	47	Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes	Chorus and Trio
18	76	Der Herr ist groß in seiner Macht	Trio and chorus
27	107	Vollendet ist das große Werk	Chorus
29	116	Von deiner Güt, o Herr und Gott / Gesegnet sei des Herren Macht	Duet with chorus
33	151	Singt dem Herren alle Stimmen!	Chorus

Tonight we spent good chunks of time on numbers 10, 33 and 29, with a quick dabble at the H-A-P-P-Y bit of 2 just to give our voices a break. There is plenty of challenging fugal/contrapuntal stuff (ie not all singing in hymn-like harmonies and coming in and singing individually) in these, and you coped with it brilliantly. When everyone has their own score you will be unstoppable.

Please keep on with Cyberbass or whatever you like to use at home – just listening to the work is good practice in its own right.

Next week we rehearse, then we are off for half term, or Valentine’s Day, whichever applies to you.

CH

One consolidated post from Lesley, Siobhan, Tricia and me – to avoid you having multiple emails, but at the cost of this being quite long. Sorry!

Scores – unfortunately not likely to have arrived for this week, so some printing to be done please. See below for the plan for what we cover so you don’t print unnecessarily.

Rehearsal this week: given the score situation, and my desire not to make you print endless sheets of paper, expect that we will be revisiting some of the movements we have already looked at and spending a chunk of time on each bit. Sorry if you’re a bit bored of singing the same stuff over and again. Once we have the scores I will be bouncing all over the place like last term. You have been warned.

Please print movements 3 (confusingly it’s 2 in the Carus edition, it’s numbered 3 on the downloads page), 10, 29 and 33, which are on the downloads page. If you previously printed English versions, do not feel the need to reprint. We can work with pseudo German for now. And for fun at the end, let’s bring Sleep and give that an airing – you did it so well in December.

From our Treasurer: Subs – you are kindly requested to pay £80 to the choir account for this term, and the payment for your Creation score of £12.50 if you ordered one but are NOT going on the tour (as you will already have paid Chris).

Thanks all, see you tomorrow

Chris

Morning all, good to see plenty of you at a surprisingly warm church last night.

It was evident that the time you spent last week in sections was worthwhile. We tackled the three movements you had looked at, and they started to come together very nicely.

They were:
1. Die Vorstellung der Chaos – notewise a very simple segment, but precision is everything. Work on the words so that we can get all the chords chiming absolutely together.
27. Vollendet ist das grosse Werk – This is one of the trickier movements, quite a lengthy one and with lots of motion and entries. We worked from the end towards the start, and by the time people were begging to move on to something else we were able to sing from letter C to the end. It was all very impressive, with the possible exception of the entries which were a bit tentative. Understandable when we are just learning the notes, but each one (Altos bar 32, Tenors bar 39, Basses bar 40 etc) needs to be emphatic. Phrasing of words like NAM-en and er-HAB-en, and slurred words like allein you were shaping beautifully, especially the Sops. It makes everything sound so much more musical when you do that.
2. Verzweiflung, Wut und Schrecken – a schizophenic movement with a chaotic mini-fugue entry followed by an almost twee section. Great job figuring out the complexity of the chaotic bits (A-B and at C). If you are working on it, make sure you are thinking 2 beats in a bar not 4. It makes much more sense.
Zadok – we finished up by looking at the third section, where there are some tricky semiquaver runs in each part. You sang these so well I felt that I had underestimated you in thinking we needed to clarify them. That said, with a piece you feel you know by heart, there is always the risk that there are occasional notes that you think you know but actually don’t quite. That Bass E, the last note of the second bar of the last page, is a good example, for me at least.

Practice Tracks – I haven’t made my own as there are several available. Cyberbass is a free option. The link is: https://www.cyberbass.org/Major_Works/Haydn_J/haydn_creation.htm. The movement numbers do not line up to the Carus score we are using but you will figure that out.

Scores – with huge thanks to Tricia Joshi for getting this organised, we are hopeful that the second batch will be with us for next week.

Until then

Chris

Hi all, I hope your sectional note learning last week was fun and successful.

This week we are back together in Christ Church – I’d suggest dressing warm. Even with the heating on, it is likely to be fresh.

Partly because some of us will still be waiting for scores, I’m going to stick to looking at the movements we have so far covered, which are on the website under Downloads.

And sincere apologies to those who printed off the Zadok copies I posted. That was the wrong version. I hate asking you to reprint and kill trees, but if you could please, the link is now correct, and is the same version as we used in 2019, so if you still have that copy, please use it.

And please also bring Bogoroditse Dyevo from last term’s concert as a repertoire sing.

See you tomorrow

Chris

Welcome back! Great to see a good turnout for the first practice of our 2-term season. Most of you know the plan but just in case, here is what we talked through this evening.

Our next concert is Saturday July 1st, and the centrepiece will be Haydn’s Creation, sung in German, accompanied by an orchestra of decent size. We intend to trim the oratorio down a bit by skipping some of the solo pieces and focusing on the choruses, while keeping the overall shape of the work. Additional pieces to bring the concert up to about 90 minutes of music will include Zadok the Priest and possibly other Coronation pieces, given that it will be a few weeks after the coronation of Charles III. [If anyone has any suggestions for pieces they would like to be considered, on any theme with orchestral accompaniment, please let me know.]

We will be sourcing Soprano, Tenor and Bass soloists and a conductor for the performance. So it will be the biggest production we have put on since pre-Covid days. Make sure you get it in your friends’ and families’ calendars asap.

Tonight we just took a quick look at the first two choruses, one of which is a tricky if short fugue, and a fun hack through Zadok. A good start to a few weeks of note learning. Thanks to Tricia Joshi for getting the scores in time for the first rehearsal against all odds.

Next week is sectionals – please make sure you are in touch so you know where to be.

There are various places you can go for practice tracks for the Creation – Cyberbass is one of the best free ones (thanks Siobhan). Choraline is another, but costs money. And if, like me, you haven’t sung this before, just get it on a playlist and listen to it often so the music starts to seep into your consciousness.

Enjoy that, thanks to all hosting the sectionals next week, and see you back at Christ Church on Tuesday 24th.

Dear All

Happy New Year everyone. Hope you’ve all had a lovely Christmas and are looking forward to getting back to singing at Sheen Gate Choir.

Our first rehearsal is next week Tuesday 10^th January, 19:45 -21:30 at Christchurch. Reprising a favourite tradition at Sheen Gate, everyone is invited to bring a bottle of whatever they’d like to drink and we’ll toast the new year, have a quick catch up and welcome any new members – as well as having a look at the music we’ll be tackling this term and next for our Summer concert.

See Chris’s earlier post for music we’ll be covering – note you’ll need to print some pages.

The second rehearsal (on 17^th January) will be a sectional, venues and details to follow, but they will be at local members’ houses as before.

Term dates are listed below:

Spring: 10^th Jan-21^st March, half term 14^th Feb

3 week Easter break (28^th March-11^th April)

Summer: 18^th April – 27^th June, half term 30^th May

The summer concert date will be on Saturday 1^st July – put it in your diaries and tell your friends! I hope this works for most people. Apologies to any of you who can’t make this date –  as always its tricky to find a date that suits everyone.

See you Tuesday!

Hello singers and welcome to SGC2023. I hope that the flush of the happiness of the holidays and the success of your singing in the December concerts still lingers pleasantly.

Siobhan will be posting a message shortly with dates and details. Thanks to her and all who have helped shape the plan for the coming two terms. As you know, we are tackling Haydn’s Creation, starting on Tuesday next week, Jan 10. I hope you are looking forward to learning a big work that this choir has never sung before.

Tricia Joshi has very kindly taken on the job of ordering scores. Please see the earlier post from her and let her know if you would like to be part of the bulk order of scores.

Just as with the music for last term, the lead time for getting music has increased and despite ordering back in early December it is likely that we won’t have the scores in our hands on Tuesday. So I have to ask you please to do some printing of music to bring along. There are 4 files on the Downloads page of the website, 3 Creation movements and Zadok the Priest. If you wouldn’t mind, please print those off and bring them on Tuesday evening. And for fun, please also bring Bogoroditse Dyevo.

Watch out for those 12 drummers today, and see you on Tuesday.

Chris

From Tricia Joshi 

We have ordered a bulk quantity of Haydn’s CREATION for those going on the Tour and have a number left over for those aren’t.  

Could all members of the choir who aren’t going on the tour please let me know (ASAP) that you would like me to order you a copy.  It is difficult to get the version we want of this work and there are delays with deliveries from the publisher at the moment.  Your deadline to respond is Monday 9th January.  We will be using the Carus Vocal score in GERMAN.

I’m handling this to help Chris and Siobhan, so please reply to patricia@joshifamily.co.uk  

See you all soon, 

Tricia

For any of you who found Xmas insufficiently intellectually demanding, and to any closet cruciverbalists amongst us (and you will know who you are), here is a puzzle to tease the brain cells.

Each year I compile a crossword for my long-suffering family. Clues are hopefully at a similar level to the Times Concise Cryptic but, as a devotee of the Listener Crossword, there is always a little more to be done than filling the grid.

This is this year’s offering. If you’d prefer a word.doc version send me your email, and If you’d like to have a go and get stuck feel free to ask for a nudge.