Hello all! I hope you had a lovely weekend and a great start to the week! A brief one for you all this week, so thanks for reading!
What we did – Wednesday 25th September
This was our final week on the Bach until January, so we tied up all of the loose ends that we hadn’t covered, as well as refreshing the opening movement.
- We began with the start of the second part, Nos. 15 (p66), 16b (p69), 16d (p76) and 17 (p84), a mix of chorales and choruses. These movements depict Jesus being taken away to Pilate – you’ll remember that we ended the previous week with the end of the first part, which saw Peter reflecting his denial of Jesus, just after he was arrested.
- After this we looked at the first movement again, reminding ourselves of the text, the performance of the music, and the different motifs – the musical building blocks.
To catch up: If you’re singing the Bach next year, please do keep looking through the piece until we start rehearsals again – it’s a mighty work, and familiarity is key. We’ve seen all of it in some good details over September, so remember those things we’ve gone through: Chorales; Choruses; Turba (‘crowds’) Choruses; motifs; structures; Da Capo choruses; chiasmus (musical symmetry); text; meaning; performance. It’ll be cracking when we come back to it in January.
What we’ll do – Wednesday 2nd October
IT’S CHRISTMAS! Haha! We begin working on our Christmas programme, so we’ll sing through as much of the programme as possible. You should all have copies of the Britten and 100 Carols for Choirs, so bring them with you this week! We’ll also be handing out the remaining music in printed booklets, so please arrive early to get these in time.
If you want to get ahead of the game, have a look at the ‘Project Sheet’ below for this term, which has the programme and all the dates in.
Marked Scores
You can find all my markings for the music below. Over the next couple of weeks, as the weather gets colder in the evenings, wrap up warm with a mug of hot chocolate/glass of wine and PLEASE PUT THE MARKINGS IN!
As with the Bach, as the editions are in copyright and we’re using the marked scores for reference only, the document is password protected – Annabel sent round the password a few weeks ago, but we’ll share it again on Wednesday.
Learning Guides
There are a few learning guides for this term, but the important one is the Ceremony of Carols by Britten.
If you subscribe to John Fletcher, you can find his learning guides HERE.
The free learning guide is available via Choralia – check it out HERE.
Listening Guides
As always I try to provide good recordings for you to listen to to help with the learning.
Most of the music is on YouTube, in one version of another. However, if you use Spotify, my playlist for the term is HERE.
Future Events
As Fran kindly mentioned on Wednesday, there are some really exciting forthcoming CRAG concerts, so get them in the diary now!
This Week’s listening
I’m doing a very exciting concert in a couple of months with the OUP Choir, and I’m currently working hard on my chamber orchestration of Charles Villiers Stanford’s Requiem. It’s a truly stunning piece of music, and I encourage you all to listen to at least the first movement, as recorded by my alma mater, the University of Birmingham. Check it out HERE.
See you all on Wednesday 2nd October!
– Ben