It has oft been said that Oriana is a choir not for the
faint-hearted, and last Saturday’s concert definitely proved that rule. In triple spades with a trump and a
twenty-one and a royal flush on top.
Picture the scene: it’s the week before the concert. We’re singing two really rather difficult
modern pieces for choir and solo sax, and we’ve managed to get John Harle, one
of the world’s top saxophonists, to come and play the sax for us. On top of that, he wrote one of the pieces,
so he’s pretty likely to notice if we’re a touch out, a bar behind him, singing
in entirely the wrong key etc. We could reasonably
be expected to concentrate more on getting his piece right, to the slight detriment
of the other sax piece, except that we’ve ALSO invited the composer of THAT one
to come and hear us sing it. We’re still
note-bashing both pieces.
We’ve had very little time to practice the beautiful but
complex Madrigali by Lauridsen, so those of us who’ve sung them before are largely
relying on memory, and the newer members are miming. We’ve just been handed an entirely new piece
to learn, arranged by our very own David-the-Conductor, and it’s a David
Drummond special – starting off quite simply and then suddenly going off into
an entirely unexpected key, just to trip us up!
We’re singing Whitacre’s Leonardo and we’re tumming when we should be
la-ing. And SOME of us (ie me) have just
discovered we’re going to be playing the finger cymbals as well.
And right now, we’re learning that what we thought was a reasonably
straightforward Gibbons piece is going to be sung by many and varied solo
voices instead of the entire choir. We’re
all shaking, not being used to solos, and those not selected for a solo think
they’re going to get off easy. But David,
being the inclusive conductor that he is, has just written four pages of extra
music for those people, so that they don’t feel left out. We’re juggling not one, not two, but THREE separate
scores while we attempt to learn this piece, and we’re about to discover that
we’re not going to just sing it, we’re going to perform it as street
theatre. We have a week to source a
medieval apothecary costume (me again), practice a cockney accent, and figure
out how to wave a pestle and mortar at the audience without losing our place in
the score.
Anyone else sensing some raised eyebrows at this point?
Well what can I say?
Oriana once again pulled it off. We
unfortunately started with the Gibbons, which we just about managed to avoid
being a total car crash. I may not have
been the most medieval of apothecaries in my GlaxoSmithKline lab coat, but I
managed to offer people aqua vitae in a convincingly Cockerney accent. Colin-the-fishwife looked most fetching in
his sou’wester, and Lucy-the-milkmaid was wearing more cow-themed items than I
thought the world could hold. Greengrocer’s
aprons paraded throughout Southwark Cathedral, and many of the audience went
home with a bonus cabbage. And you can’t
say that about many concerts, can you?
Anyway, once the excruciating embarrassment of the Gibbons
was over, the rest of the concert was pretty fine. The sax pieces were glorious and moving
(despite a couple of hairy moments) and the Whitacre “Leonardo” was fun and
precise. And I am overwhelmed by our
ability to remember the Lauridsen Madrigali.
They were a triumph. Once again
the choir has proved how good we really are.
Well done fellow choristers, I salute you!
So another Oriana concert safely
in the bag. It was all too easy
really. Next time we should get all the
music on the day of the concert, simultaneously translate it into Swahili and stand
on our heads the whole time. Now THAT’s
what I call a challenge.
