End of season concert success

Our final concert of the season took place last night, and a very good time was had by all! Except possibly the cellist we hired. If you were at the concert you may have had some problems spotting the cellist, but I promise you he was there. He was supposed to be playing continuo for the Monteverdi, along with our usual rehearsal accompanist David-the-Pianist on fake harpsichord. But during the afternoon rehearsal we realised the choir weren’t able to hear the accompanying instruments, so we were struggling to remain in tune with them. We’re usually pretty good at keeping the pitch up during concerts, but we decided on balance that it would just be too excruciating for the audience if we got it wrong, and at the 11th hour David-the-Conductor cut the continuo altogether. David-the-Pianist, who is used to the choir’s freewheeling nature, accepted this with aplomb and joined the bass section instead. The cellist however didn’t feel able to sing, so he ended up (I kid you not) playing the wobbleboard during “Cloudburst”. We must be the only choir in the world that hires professional cellists to play percussion.

The concert went really pretty well. The first half was excellent – the Monteverdi was glorious, When David Heard was magical (even though we ran out of time to practice it, so some of the newer members of the choir were miming!) and we finished with Whitacre’s “Cloudburst” which has to be the most fun piece to perform. Which is lucky, as we had to do it all over again at the end of the concert for recording purposes. David-the-Conductor explained to the audience that we were redoing it because of some technical difficulties with the recording equipment. I have a sneaking suspicion that he had smoothly substituted the term “technical difficulties” for “the damn choir were all over the shop”, but I may just be being paranoid. Certainly we got a passage wrong that we have never got wrong before, but from outside I think it just sounded like extra dissonance – and lets face it, you can never have too much of that in 20th century music. So actually, we improved on the original. The audience was lucky to witness it!

The second half was our Monteverdi and Lauridsen Madrigals Mash-up, which went pretty well - although we were definitely all breathing palpable sighs of relief whenever we turned to the Lauridsen pieces, which we know much better. And we finished with Whitacre’s “Leonardo Dreams” which is another really fun piece. The concert was the first time that we’d ever managed to sing the piece all the way through, and to our delight it went really well. We then did a quick encore of a few “Animal Crackers”, got “Cloudburst” wrong again, and made a sharp exit to the pub. Phew – I think we got away with it!