A massive hello to you all from our new house! I’m sorry for the delay in getting these notes posted as the past few days have been filled with frantic packing and moving, but I’m pleased to say we’re a lot more settled now (even if we don’t yet know where everything is!)
At the bottom of this post is some more information about the Chipping Norton Music Festival. It’ll be so good for everyone to come and represent the choir, and I hope you’ll all be able to make it. I believe there’ll be a tick-box on the sign-in sheet at the rehearsal to say whether you’ll be attending or not. Alternatively, if you know you can’t make it, please email Eric to let him know.
What we did on 09.02.22
Brilliant work on the Verdi – it was great to cover that final section, and I’m really beginning to get a sense of the text through your expression now. It’ll be great to piece it all together.
I love how well the Credo is coming along; so much was remembered from the previous week, and we were able to do some fabulously detailed work on the opening through to the Bass solo on page 58. Just a reminder to keep the drama alive throughout, and we are the ‘backing vocals’ to the Tenor soloist at figure 3.
What we will do on 16.02.22
Verdi Stabat Mater: All the way through! At this point in term, it’ll be great to see where this piece is, so we’ll sing through it all, then top and tail small sections so we know what to look at over the half term break.
Puccini Credo: Page 60-End – the final bit of the Puccini that we need to cover before the break. There’s a lot here, and a lot of stylistic changes, but you’ll manage it with ease, and hopefully a lot of it will come back from the first week we did it.
Piece of the Week
This week’s suggested listening is a shameless bit of self-promotion: it’s our final Showcase event as part of the Fellowship with the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain. It’s a free, online viewing, at 6:30pm on Tuesday 15th Feb. I hope it gives you an chance to see what I’ve been up to with my work with NYCGB. ‘Tickets’ via the website have sold out, but you should be able to just watch it on their YouTube channel here.
Marked Scores
As before, the marked scores are here. If you haven’t yet put the markings in, I’d greatly appreciate it if you would.
Chipping Norton Music Festival
Sarah will confirm this in the rehearsal on Wednesday, but we’ll be singing on Saturday 5th March, with our set beginning around 4pm. Bernard will be accompanying us for this, and we’ll be singing the Kyrie and the beginning of the Gloria. I would love to have the whole choir there, and to use it as a great opportunity to perform together and to the community, so please put this in the diary.
See you on Wednesday,
Ben