Angels from the Realms of ... Gory

What can I say about choir this week? It was a smorgasbord of Christmassy stuff. A bit of Handel, a touch of traditional arr. Wilcocks, a healthy dollop of Giles Swayne’s Starlight (hurray!), a smattering of Bruckner and a pinch of traditional arr Drummond combined for some exciting musical fireworks and hideous musical collapses.

The collapses were largely in “Angels from the Realms of Glory”, which we’re singing in a not unchallenging arrangement by our very own David-the-Conductor. Angels from the Realms of Glory was written by James Montgomery in the 19th century, and appears to have several possible tunes. In England, though, the first time it appeared someone said “oh hang on, it’s that Angels one, I know how this goes” and ever since we have sung it to the tune of “Angels we have Heard on High”. David-the-Conductor’s arrangement takes this traditional carol interchange and expands on it, throwing in “Gloria”s and “Joy to the world”s with gay abandon and mixing them all up in some very unexpected harmonies. This was complicated stuff, and slowly but surely we all lost track of where we were. By verse 4 we may as well have been wading in chromatic mud. David-the-Conductor somehow coped with the horror of listening to us mess up his arrangement and dragged us through to the end with some very determined arm-waving, but we definitely didn’t finish in realms of glory. We’ve still got two weeks to polish it up though, so I’m sure we’ll be ready to spring it on the audience by the time the concert rolls around.

And the audience had better look to their laurels, because Angels is this year’s Oriana Audience Challenge, where the audience have to grit their teeth and make it through a carol together while the choir do everything we can to put them off. The audience are usually surprisingly good at this, but it is always a moment of tension in our Christmas concert. Someone in the second row actually swooned under the pressure two years ago and had to be revived by Phil the Tenor. If Wednesday’s run-through of Angels is anything to go by I think we might have to put the local hospitals on high alert this year.