Our next Come and Sing Day will be on Saturday 15th February 2020 when our Choir director will take us through Faure Requiem.
Gabriel Fauré composed his Requiem in D minor between 1887 and 1890. The setting of the shortened Catholic Mass for the Dead is the best known of his large works. Its focus is on eternal rest and consolation. Fauré wrote of the work, "Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my Requiem, which moreover is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest." A performance takes about 35 minutes. We plan to register from 9.30 and begin singing at 10.00 Music will be provided as will tea & coffee. There are a few good cafes in the village but a packed lunch might be more useful with only 45 minutes lunch break. The charge is £20 and we would be very grateful if this could be paid in advance. For more details download an application form below. We look forward to singing with you.
Review Spring workshop 2019 Together A tenor’s view of things
A choral workshop is an event complete in itself. It is not the culmination of weeks of rehearsal, it is not an early, tentative, step in the preparation of the piece. Those who are there on the day experience the entire thing together, from putting out the chairs to putting them away again. (Kate and Carole can’t look at it like that of course, they have hours of preparation before the day, as do the guest soloists. Our thanks to them.) As Haydn’s Nelson Mass drew to a close there was a shout of delight. The small audience, half a dozen or so friends of the choir, evidently enjoyed the piece but putting on a show was not really the purpose of the day. It was not the audience that generated the volume of applause. The title, “workshop”, implies that something serious, something constructive is going on. And so it is. To bring a substantial piece of music to the point where it can be offered with confidence to an audience, however small, in five hours, demands detailed knowledge of the score and a carefully thought out learning process on the day. The audience has a task in this. They authenticate the day’s work, set implicit targets in respect of time and quality and bring the day to a close in, we hope, a congratulatory manner. But something else was going on. The workshop, like all successful workshops, was a celebration. More than just a collection of individuals, a successful choir is a community. The choir, Kate, Carol and the guest soloists were expressing their shared sense of the exhilaration that comes when everything coheres. Many, perhaps most of the choir were singing this mass for the first time. In our applause we expressed our glee at successfully concluding the challenge of the day. And we asserted, exuberantly, the capacity of song to establish and maintain links between people. That was what the shout was about. When choral singing gels, such exuberance is entirely justified.