{"id":945,"date":"2012-10-07T20:24:27","date_gmt":"2012-10-07T20:24:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/cantusfirmus\/?p=945"},"modified":"2012-10-07T20:24:46","modified_gmt":"2012-10-07T20:24:46","slug":"underway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/cantusfirmus\/2012\/10\/07\/underway\/","title":{"rendered":"Underway"},"content":{"rendered":"

And so this year’s Chamber Choir has met for the first time; after weeks of preparation and two days’s worth of auditions, finally comes the time actually to get to grips with the repertoire, not to mention getting to know the group.<\/p>\n

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Camille Saint-Saens: 1835-1921<\/p><\/div>\n

For a group finding its feet for the first time, our first rehearsal was somedeal astonishing; having chosen the first few pieces with which to begin, we ended up rehearsing five works in total, rather than just the three I’d selected (so much for breaking the group in gently!). Our first musical steps were into Handel’s Hear Thou My Weeping<\/em>, in an arrangement for four-part choir by Desmond Ratcliffe, a setting of the Ave Verum Corpus<\/em> by Saint-Sa\u00ebns (rather than its more famous incarnation from Mozart), and a look at two sections of the piece written by Yours Truly for the December concert.<\/p>\n

The Handel in particular came off the page rather well, and the choir readily picked up the mood of the piece. The piece is a four-part setting of the aria ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from Rinaldo<\/em>, usually sung as a solo, but realised here for SATB in a manner sympathetic to the original, and the group got the hang of it well. There’s already a sense amongst some of the group that it may become the choir’s calling-card piece this year…<\/p>\n