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Hi all, another very encouraging rehearsal last night. Thanks to all who made it, some nice noises being made despite three out of four parts being thin on the ground. There are some nasty bugs going around – I hope everyone is well.

Here’s the recap of what we sang.

Abendlied ~ we spent some time on the second half of the piece, which uses a repeating canon on ‘Und der Tag.’ It was coming together pretty well. Those entries, part by part, need to be 100% confident – worth 5 minutes of practice time if you have the urge. And when you work on those entries, please think carefully about the idea of singing repeated notes (und der Tag is a prime example) with each note slightly higher than the last. Soon enough we will be pulling the piano support out from underneath us, and when we do, staying in tune will become the next major challenge for this and other works.

Sure on this Shining Night ~ this was our biggest chunk of time last night, and again, our focus was on the middle and end sections. The middle, from D on p5, covers the climax of the work at the top of p6 – where we worked on note security, which was excellent, including plenty of complex 8-part chords. Great job by the 5 Sops hitting top A flats repeatedly. Bars 42/43, which is the extra-long ‘shining’ was the one little segment that was slightly shaky – another useful place for 5 minutes’ work. We also worked through the coda, from E to the end. Again, the notes were very good in every part. Clearly some homework has been going on, and it is paying off. Thank you!

Bogorditse Dyevo ~ Again, we focused on the middle and end passages. Bars 20-25 cover some intricate moving lines, in Altos and Basses and then in the Tenors. It was good – nothing more to say here. If you want to practise this piece, work on singing in smooth phrases, and with a nice focused tone as you cement your notes.

Underneath the Stars ~ yup, it was the middle and end that we worked on. Bars 33-34, with the one tiny section of unexpected harmonies, received extra attention. Those few notes are a place for anyone with time to practise. From p6 to the end for ATB, the piece is really just a repeated ‘go gently’ to accompany the tune. Not hard, but needs to be precise. When we sang the whole thing through, once again the knowledge of notes and rhythms was excellent.

Dark Night ~ just to upset Lesley after saying you didn’t need to bring the music for this one, we took our first look at this piece. You learned the first theme instantly, and sang it impressively ‘bigly.’ Then, so as to stay consistent with the rest of the rehearsal, we looked at the end passage, from F to the end. Nothing too tricky, but it is in 8 parts, and counting or watching – or preferably both – is essential as the time signature is 3, 4, 5 or 7 in a bar in the space of a dozen notes.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Holly Lodge Concert – right now we do not have enough people who have said they can make that night (Thursday Dec 8) to be able to commit to do the concert, and we do need to get back to the organisers and tell them one way or another. Can everyone who has not already done so please reply to Siobhan’s mail/post asap? Thanks.
Half term – we ARE rehearsing on Tuesday October 18th. There will NOT be a regular rehearsal on Tuesday October 25th.

Finally, if you have any requests for pieces that we can sing for fun at the end of a rehearsal, please shout them out.

Have a good week, see you next Tuesday.

Chris

Just a short one this week, to help those who struggle with getting to the bottom of messages. Firstly, if you have not seen and responded to Siobhan’s message about the Holly Lodge carol service, please do – we need to assess whether we have enough of each part to commit, and we need to give them an answer.

For this week, please bring all of the music, both purchased and printed from downloads. The one piece you don’t need to bring is the Gjeilo Dark Night. For fun this week, a piece you may have heard once or twice – Hallelujah, from the Messiah. Bring your book if you have it, or download here. Thanks and see you on Tuesday.

Chris

Dear All 

Many of you may recall that we were planning to take part in the Holly Lodge Centre (a local charity) Christmas Concert last year before it was sadly cancelled. Happily, Holly Lodge have invited us to take part in this year’s concert at Christchurch on Thursday 8^th December.

The plan would be for us to sing a selection of pieces from our concert repertoire (to be decided by Chris) and support the audience in singing a few carols. Sheen Mount School choir will also perform and possibly a special needs school choir. 

It would be fantastic if we could take part this year but need to check we have sufficient numbers in each part to do so.

Please could you let me and your section leader know if you are able to sing on 8^th December. Prompt responses would be appreciated so we can let Holly Lodge know as soon as possible.

Many thanks

Siobhan 

Dear All

Please find details of Robert’s next knitting concert below:

Concert on Sunday 9th October at 6pm at All Saints Church, Putney Common, SW15 1HL.

A recital of violin and piano music with the violinist Madeleine Mitchell. We’ll be playing sonatas by Copland (evocative, punchy and jolly tricky to count) and Richard Strauss (lush, just lush) and maybe an encore or two if things go well. Madeleine is stunning and I’ve been doing some practice. Free admission and free drinks with a retiring collection for the performers’ fund. I’ll give it a plug at the next rehearsal but please put the date in your diaries meanwhile.

Hi all

First, before I forget again – Music. Three things. One, those of you who are part of the second batch order may have noticed that you didn’t get everything you ordered. The Gjielo book is on back order. The projected delivery date is not good – around half term. So we may need to do some printing. I will let you know. Two, if you have missed the first two orders and still want music, I will place one final order this week. If you need to be a part of that order please let me know by 5pm Thursday 29th. And three, thanks to those who paid already. The total due and my bank details are in the small print at the bottom of the page with the provisional program. Thank you. Hopefully from next week on, we can have the beneficial situation of everyone having their own copy of everything, purchased or printed, and no sharing required.

OK, on to last night’s singing. Another excellent first stab at some tricky pieces. Thank you all for being there.

Lully, Lulla, Lullay – it’s a delicate little lullaby, and so needs to be sung sweetly, which you did. The perennial issue with this piece is staying in tune. The two things I want you to have in your head throughout are – 1. when you have repeated notes, make the next note ever so slightly sharp (up) from the last. 2. jumps up: you need to make them bigger than you think; steps down: you need to make smaller than you think. If you have a piano or other instrument, try singing a verse, your part, no accompaniment, and when you finish check on the piano to see if you are still in tune. If you have sagged, even if only slightly, turn up the dial on those two tips.

In the Stillness – you picked this up beautifully. Not much to say here. We will run over it plenty more times, but for the most part that will be about polishing. If you want to practise something, practise saying ‘hush’ for exactly one beat and keeping the ‘sh’ very short! And saying ‘stillness’ with all of the emphasis on the first syllable. And singing really low notes.

Sleep – we spent a little time on those tricky 4 bars, 59-62. For those who want homework, I would suggest singing those with the practice track as many times as you can bear. It’s 8-part singing with parts moving all over each other. To make it work we need those notes totally solid to give that Soprano top A flat all the support it deserves.

Underneath the Stars – I had decided not to work on this this week, but as the music arrived, and as you breezed through the other stuff, I stuck it back in (sorry, Robert), and you did amazingly well at picking up those syncopations. Walk around the house tapping the beat on your leg and humming the tune to yourself. Line up the taps with the words, or put the words between the taps – getting it right as to which is which is the whole thing. Altos and Tenors – you know that one bar at the bottom of page 5 is one that needs some attention.

O Holy Night – Once we had, mostly, figured out which notes on which piece of paper we were supposed to be singing, you got hold of this very quickly. I will figure out what language we are singing some time before December 17th. Probably. If you are singing it to yourself, just insist on sharp dotted rhythms. Get that ingrained. If you want to practise notes, bars 27-37 were a little shaky. One comment – there are lots of different versions of this piece, so if you are trying to sing along to a YouTube recording you will have a problem. Later today I will put a full choir version up with the practice tracks that you can use for singing along. Same place on the website.

Finally, if you have read all the way down to here, this comment is probably not for you. I will aim to send a pre-rehearsal post every Monday, and it will contain the ‘sing for fun’ piece that we will do that Tuesday. So you need to read to the bottom and click on the link and hit print or you won’t have it! And if you have any requests for this piece, please let me know.

You’re sounding great already. Keep singing, keep smiling as you do, and see you next week.

Chris

The ordered music has just arrived, so if you were part of the order, there is no need to print In the Stillness, Sleep, or Lully, Lulla, Lullay for tomorrow as requested in the prior post.

Hello singers, I hope you all had a good weekend.

For this Tuesday’s rehearsal, my plan is to look at some of the pieces we did not cover last week. So in addition to what you brought last week, please make sure that you have printed off the music for O Holy Night (Cantique de Noel).

Unfortunately, the order with the sheet music for the other items has still not arrived. Using the Royal Mail at the moment is apparently a bad idea. The supplier and I are chasing from both sides, but it is possible that again we will not have the official music. So, if you do not have the music yet for In the Stillness and Lully, Lulla, Lullay, I would appreciate it if you could print those off too. For the L,L,L if you hate printing unnecessarily, just the first 3 pages will suffice.

We will also be reviewing the Rameau O Nuit and Whitacre Sleep from last week, so if you don’t already have those, please print those too.

And for our end-of-rehearsal sing-for-fun piece, please grab your Mozart Requiem scores if you have them. If not, you will find the Lacrimosa for download in the repertoire section of the Music Library.

Apologies for the repeated calls on your printers. After this week, we will hopefully have everything we need in hand and can focus on singing rather than ink cartridges.

See you tomorrow

Chris

Welcome back! It was wonderful to be together singing again. Lovely to see everyone, and to see some new faces. We are very happy to have you join us. As a choir, you all made a really good sound, right out of the gate. Well done for the note learning you have done in sections and on your own.

Tonight we looked at:

Rameau: O Nuit – simple, but it needs to be spot on to avoid being messy. ATB parts could usefully brush up on making their harmonies 100% secure.

Lauridsen: Sure on this Shining Night – musically, this was the highlight tonight for me. It was hard to believe that this was a new piece for us, you sang it with an assuredness that meant that, within 20 minutes, I was not bothering about the notes but starting to talk about phrasing and dynamics. It is a beautiful piece, and one that has immense scope for making it special. I am looking forward to singing it again. If you want to work on this one this week, and you are confident of the first couple of pages and the coda that we looked at, by all means have a look at the tricky, climactic middle section.

Rachmaninoff: Bogoroditse Dyevo – a good start on what is not an easy piece. This would be a great place to spend some homework time. Nothing about any part is, of itself, especially difficult. But getting totally confident and to the point that you can look up rather than at the music would be a big step forward. Practise with the part tracks, or better yet, with the full choir recording.

Whitacre: Sleep – if the Lauridsen was my musical highlight, then this was my technical one. I was so impressed with how well you knew your parts, even where they divide. Tenors and Basses – please work on the ‘dark and deep’ section. Those chords in that rising-falling sequence are such a recognisable part of this piece, all four parts – T1,2 & B1,2 have to be equally strong and emotive. Anyone in any part that wants to press on, look at the spooky ‘transparent’ middle section. Try singing those bars so that they might give young children nightmares. That is what he was going for here.

Rheinberger: Abendlied – More great singing for a first time through. Those last polyphonic chords, starting fortissimo and decaying away to pianissimo in just a few notes were fantastic. Like the Rachmaninoff, this is a good one to devote some homework to, for exactly the same reasons. Know your notes really well and we can make this little piece sound as pretty as it is.

I will send another post with plans for next week’s agenda. But you can expect some Christmas music – sorry it’s so early. And the Rusby ‘Underneath the Stars.’ If you want to get ahead of the game, look at that. It’s all about the syncopation.

Great singing. See you next week

Chris

Hello all

For those who have ordered but not received music, I am afraid that it looks like it will not, after all, be here for tonight’s rehearsal. It was posted last week but I suppose that the bank holiday and general disruption resulting from the Queen’s sad death has caused postal backups.

My plan for tonight is to look at these 5 pieces:

Rameau Hymne a la Nuit; Rachmaninoff Bogoroditse Dyevo; Rheinberger Abendlied – all of which are free downloads anyway, so please make sure you have those printed and with you.

Whitacre Sleep; Lauridsen Sure on this Shining Night – these are part of the delayed order. They are available for download on the website for temporary use. If you have time to print a copy please do. If you have a spare please bring it. And we can share copies if we need to.

And please remember also to print and bring the Bruckner Locus Iste. You don’t need to print anything else for tonight’s rehearsal.

All the downloads are in the top menu bar under Music and Media Library – the pieces for this term are under the December 2022 Concert heading; the Bruckner is under Repertoire.

See you at 7.45.

Chris

Hi all, I hope everyone is well.

First, immense thanks to the people who kindly hosted and/or led the first two rehearsals, in their homes, and evidently in some cases with nibbles and throat medicine of the ‘red or white?’ variety. If you found it helpful to have done a chunk of note-bashing in the comfort of an armchair, please join me in thanking those who made that possible.

For those waiting for the second music order to arrive, you will have most of the pieces in your hands next week. For those who already have theirs, thanks to those who have paid, and for those who have not yet, you will find my account details at the bottom of the printed page of the provisional program sheet.

Next week, TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 20th, we are back together at CHRIST CHURCH at 7.45. If you want to do some extra practice at home before then (no pressure, just for those who have asked!), then some more note-checking on everything you have learned, but especially:

Whitacre Sleep, with special attention to the fantastic climax on pages 8-10.
Rameau Hymne a la Nuit – I am hoping all parts are ready just to put it together!
Lauridsen Sure on this Shining Night, with special attention to the section from D to E (pages 5-6) – parts split and notes clash and sops soar.

You have all of the practice tracks for note learning and recordings to sing along to here, on the website under the Music and Media Library dropdown.

In addition to the music you have, if you wouldn’t mind printing off and bringing along Bruckner’s Locus Iste next week, just to sing through for fun.

Finally – if you have not already dropped your friends and family a Save The Date note for the concert on December 17th, please do so! Make sure that we minimize their chance to say ‘Oh darn it, I am already booked up that night!’

Looking forward to seeing everyone in one place next week, and hearing us sing as a choir again. Have a good, if sombre and emotional week.

Chris