rehearsal workshop | Cantus Firmus

You can tell that we have performances looming; our rehearsals are coming thick and fast, none more so than Saturday’s all-day session. These lengthier rehearsals are infinitely more useful than our customary two-and-a-half-hour weekly meetings, as they allow for more concentrated, more sustained working. You have time to develop the whole process – looking at notes through balancing chords, to shaping, dynamics, placing consonants, making sure vowel shapes are correct, unity of ensemble sound, time really to get beneath the skin of the music far more in longer rehearsal sessions; and over more pieces, too.

Twitter9853554 Saturday therefore allowed us to immerse ourselves in the repertoire for our looming performances, and showed us aspects of the programme that hadn’t been apparent before. A long look at Tartini’s Stabat Mater, for instance, ended with the Choir singing the whole piece through for the first time, and we discovered the piece has an emotional scale and drama far outweighing the scope of its slight appearance on the page. Moving between radiant, three-voice colours and the stark simplicity of plainsong in its setting of the agonising text reflecting on Christ’s Mother weeping at the foot of the Cross, and a yearning to share in Christ’s passion, the music demands sustained concentration in order to bring out the tone of the text as it unfolds.

We also pieced together, for the first time in its entirety, Veljo Tormis’ Spring Sketches, a beautiful set of short songs evoking various nature-scenes – the ebb and flow of the sea, apple-blossom, the colours of the evening sky, the warmth of late spring and the echoing cuckoo-call. There are some ravishing chords at various places in the suite, which need careful balancing if the colours are to come forth. Assistant conductor, third-year Joe Prescott, also took the Choir through pieces by Mozart, Brahms and Cornysh’s Ah, Robin. WP_20160130_008

WP_20160130_012 Mid-way through the afternoon, we decamped to Studio 3 Gallery, the venue for our first concert on Friday 12 February, in which the Choir will perform amidst the backdrop to the gallery’s new exhibition, After the Break, which exams the work of two artists, Grete Marks and Kurt Schwitters, who both fled Nazi Germany and came to settle in England. There’s something highly atmospheric about performing amidst visual art – the rapport between the two media means you experience the music differently in the context of the artwork, and your response to the artwork is different in the context of music.

The Choir rehearsing in Studio 3 Gallery

We arranged ourselves in the corner of the gallery, and started to sing what will be the first piece in the programme, a Kyrie by Hildegard von Bingen. We reached the end of the first phrase – and stopped. The rich acoustic of the gallery had blossomed as that first phrase unravelled, lifting and filling the space, and there was a sense immediately that time had turned, travelling back over a thousand years.

WP_20160130_022 It was a remarkable moment.

You could see on the faces of the singers that something had just occurred, something unexpected, something quire powerful. There was a pause, and then an excited buzz went around the room; this gig is Going To Work!

We spent the remainder of the afternoon running through the entire programme, from that skirling Kyrie and ending with the dancing Song of the Stars by Bob Chilcott. Clothed in the sonorous acoustic of Studio 3, the ensemble had a much more vivid, unified sound; and in fact we discovered that we need to tailor the louder sections somewhat, in order not to overwhelm the listener! But we can also go very much quieter in the softer passages, really draw the audience to us and make them listen.

WP_20160130_019 All in all, then, a good day’s work. And first-year Alice S’s cake-making skills were in evidence yet again – there was some pressure to live up to the excellence of her contribution to lunch after the success of her effort last term, and it seems she didn’t disappoint this time around either. We pick up again tomorrow night, in a steady build-up into both concerts this month, and at last the pieces are starting to bloom. Come and here them for yourselves…

There were major changes made during the Chamber Choir’s all-day rehearsal over the weekend, brave decisions being taken, and lots of creative ideas – most of them, excitingly, from the Choir itself!

Throughout the day, I felt as though I was slowly relinquishing control of the group, as they started to operate more and more independently. Whilst this was ever so slightly alarming, not to mention unexpected, it was a good thing, a positive sign that, at last, the group is beginning to act and feel as one.

Percussion Scholar Carina Evans took time out from playing the Orchestra and Concert Band to come along and play the percussion parts in the piece I’ve written for the concert, ‘Forgotten Children’s Songs;’ moving between marimba, triangle, bodhran and tambourine, the new textures added some real zip to the movements, especially the last one; the set has really come to life, and will be a vibrant way to bring the concert to a close.

Second-year Emma leading a warm-up

There were problems with pitch during the early part of the rehearsal, with intonation not always very secure and pieces often ending up dropping a semitone by the end (which, when you’re delivering bottom D’s as a bass in Tavener’s setting of the Lord’s Prayer, can be quite a challenge!) we changed our approach to key vowels to try to keep the pitch up; we thought about breathing; we changed our psychological approach to the shapes of phrases to think about intervals differently; and none of them yielded any significant change.

Then, from out of the blue, two of the ladies in the Choir suggested, for a change, we should stand in mixed formation, with each singer standing next to voices singing a different part, and see what happened. We duly shuffled around, and once arranged to make sure this was so, we started the piece again. Whilst this immediately resulted in a very different sound, it also meant (as everyone observed afterwards) that you could hear different parts that previously you couldn’t hear. The intonation was much improved, and now the group decided to stay in this formation for the remainder of the rehearsal. Singing in isolation from their own particular voice-part, suddenly everyone had to take charge of driving their individual line, with the resulting collective ensemble sound very much improved.

There was a great deal of fun to be had with extremes of dynamic contrast in the Hassler madrigal; we’ve decided to keep the dynamic changes throughout the verses spontaneous and unplanned on the night; it keeps everyone on their toes, and because we’re clearly having a lot of fun being mischievous with them, hopefully the audience will sense this too.

The Choir decided, by the end of the day, that they want to sing in the new formation on the night, a brave decision given that it’s less than two weeks until the performance and it means re-thinking all the pieces, including the three which we sang in the Gala concert in December. But it’s a measure of how much the group is growing in confidence, the fact that it wants to try new things and push itself further. There’s still work to do, now, in getting used to singing all of the pieces in the new line-up – and, as a conductor, I’ve got to re-think where and how to cue the voice-parts, given they are now scattered throughout the entire group; thanks, team! – but there’s a sense that the choir is really starting to fly now. We just have to trust each other and let go.

In performance mode

Find out more about the concert on the Choir’s ‘Wallwisher’ wall here, and details about the concert on our What’s On diary online here.

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Blogging about choral life at the University of Kent, through rehearsal to performance

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Colour, art and cake

Radical changes and relinquishing control