Christmassy Poulenc

Calling all local hospitals, last week’s alert to be on stand-by during our concert is cancelled. I repeat, hospitals, stand down!

After this week’s rehearsal I am now confident that we won’t require their aid after all during Angels from the Realms of Glory. David-the-Conductor has made some changes to his arrangement to simplify it for us, and as we get more familiar with the trickier harmonies and cross rhythms they’re really starting to fall into place. So carnage is unlikely to rule our performance of this piece, although it might well be worth still having a St John’s Ambulance stand, just in case. But that’s an impressive improvement in just one week, isn’t it? And we’ve still got two weeks to go until the concert. If we continue the same rate of improvement maybe we’ll end up being able to heal the sick ourselves.

We actually had an extremely successful rehearsal this week despite sub-zero temperatures in the church which acts as our back-up rehearsal venue. Even this provided a good opportunity to get to know new people in the choir, as all 60 of us tried to crowd onto the 6-by-4-foot heating grate at half time. Survival of the fittest and judicious use of elbows reined. Once rehearsal resumed we raced through lots of music, targeting improvements until it all started to sound fantastic. The Poulenc Christmas Motets were especially beautiful. Poulenc of course was one of Les Six, a group of composers pulled together by Cocteau for little reason other than that he thought it would be a great marketing ploy and they’d make loads of dosh. Kind of like a chic 1920s Simon Cowell. Poulenc happened to be standing in front of Honegger in the baguette queue at the local Carre-Four when Cocteau was passing, and a phenomenon was born. The group unsurprisingly fell apart almost before it was formed, citing “musical differences”, and they all went off to have solo careers of varying success. Poulenc managed to successfully shake off his siX-Factor associations and underwent a bit of a religious conversion, becoming a composer of some of the most glorious sacred music ever written. The Christmas Motets are up there with the best, and are the cherry on top of a fantastic Christmas programme. I urge you to come to this year’s concert, it’s going to be a stunner.