It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… Last night’s rehearsal began, I think it is fair to say, pretty poorly. Tempi were dragging, voices were behind the beat, intonation wasn’t great, lines kept going flat, the words were lifeless, there was no story-telling; it felt like an uphill struggle.

And then, and then…

Before...

Midway through the rehearsal, the choir sang what has recently become its calling-card piece, the carol Remember, O Thou Man: they sing this piece extremely well, it has to be said – they breathe as one, they each commit to leading their voice-part, the words really come alive, and the piece works.

It’s as though the group suddenly remembered what they can do, and that they can do it well. The mood changed instantly after the piece, and the second half of the rehearsal worked like a dream. The antiphons had lilt and shape, the other carols came alive, and the prevailing mood was suddenly one of realisation: we can do this, and we are doing it jolly well! At the end of the session, we went back over two of the carols with which the rehearsal had started, and it was as though they were different pieces. Or perhaps we were a different choir.

What’s particularly exciting about this moment is that members of the group are starting to comment on how they can improve, and are starting to give highly motivational speeches – ‘Look, this is what we need to do…’ The first half had been full of my exhortations, trying to get them to do all those things that they hadn’t been doing; but in the second half, they were motivating themselves.

When the group are all working as one, when they are all breathing together, coming in confidently, positively, and telling the story, the results are electrifying. It’s this magic that elevates a performance from a good one to a great one; we just have to remember that we are capable of great performing… When the ideas are fizzing around amongst the singers themselves, when they’re starting to work out what is working well and how they can work to make it happen each time, that’s when things start to get really exciting; the group are learning much faster when they are realising things for themselves.

Such was the palpable enthusiasm that the group suggested singing one of the piece without copies; and did it work! As soon as heads are lifted out of scores, as soon as they are having to look up and sing out, the change in the level of performing is remarkable. You know things are starting to go well when the choir volunteer to sing pieces from memory!

We’ve worked out how to get rehearsals starting at the same standard as that at which last night’s ended: we’re going to start each rehearsal by singing Remember, O Thou Man¸as a reminder of what we should be doing.  As we all realised last night, we were a completely different group at the end of the rehearsal than we had been at the beginning. The trick now will be for us to remember how we were performing at the end, to capture that sense, and to bring it out at the start of subsequent rehearsals, so we start working at the improved level at which we have previously finished.

After...

If we can do this, and do it on Friday, then the concert promises to be something really quite extraordinary…