Last week I decided, on the advice of a girl at work, to go and attend choir practice with the Whitehall choir. They practice every Tuesday night from 6.30 until 9pm, at St Stephen's Church on Rochester Row, and apparently they've been going for something like fifty years, which makes them quite prestigious in my book. They regularly perform concerts, and in fact the next one will be a performance of the Magnificat at St John's Smith Square at the end of November.
Walking into a church filled with a hundred people who are all brilliant singers is quite daunting. I realised immediately that this sort of choir would be hard work: everyone there can read music and the conductor/choir instructor is a composer himself. It was the first day of the term, and the two pieces we are learning to sing are two versions of the Magnificat by Johann Sebastian Bach and Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach.
For those of you who have never heard of these pieces (and I must admit I didn't know much about them myself a week ago), they are rather long motets made up of a series of choruses and solos. We were of course working on the choruses (we managed to cover about three in that first choir session) and I cannot stress how incredible hard it was to try to sing them. The closest I've ever been to that sort of situation was when I sang in the Church choir at Stonyhurst, where we also had to sight-read music. However, we never sang anything more difficult than the Kyrie, which once you've done it a couple of times isn't too bad. This was a lot harder however, made difficult by the constantly escalating and changing notes, and trills to account for too. I was sat with the lower sopranos, although I still found it hard to reach a few notes, and wouldn't be surprised if they demoted me to an alto. I've never sung alto before...
I got a chance to speak to a few people during the rehearsal break, which thankfully included a cup of tea. I love my cups of tea!! That's when I learnt a little more about the audition procedure for this choir. I'll have to go through an audition after practise in a week or two, and the conductor will get me to do a few scales (to identify my range), to do some sight reading (*gulp*) and to sing a piece on my own. I've never really been nervous about singing in public, but this guy really knows his stuff, which is beginning to worry me. I'm leaning towards singing 'Let it go' from Frozen, which I know really well now, and think I can carry off without an accompanist. But who knows. I reckon there's a good chance I might not make the cut, but at least I've tried. I'll keep you all up-to-date on that front, and if I make it through, hopefully I'll be singing the Magnificat at the concert in November!!
Comments
Post a Comment