Way haul away to the Barbican

As rehearsal for our sea-themed concert started last Friday, one of the other sopranos sidled up to me, clutching her folder with a worried expression.
“How many pieces have you got?” she hissed.
I looked in my folder, just to recount one more time. “Five,” I murmured back.
She nodded, relieved, and I patted her shoulder reassuringly. This was the lowest number of pieces we’ve done at a concert in quite some time, as we normally like to challenge ourselves with at least 15 pieces, all in different styles. So we were all fighting the insecurity that our lightweight music folders were instilling. If we aren’t risking a hernia, it just doesn’t feel like an Oriana concert.

Luckily, what we lacked in sheer numbers of pieces, we made up for in complexity. The Bruckner is superb but it’s not easy to sing well, and we were all desperate to do it justice. The Willcocks was tricky in many places, and the Bingham (I just can’t hide my feelings here) is the stuff that pelagic nightmares are made of. And we were rehearsing with an excellent but entirely new brass, wind and percussion section, so precious rehearsal minutes trickled by while we tried to get used to each other’s sound.

So come the concert we were once again in the throes of panic, but as always we rose to the challenge and pulled off a passable performance. The Bingham was a little seat-of-the-pants, but falling back on an old Oriana stalwart trick, we plastered grins on our faces, picked any note at random, and sang it out confidently. The resulting dissonant clashes may or may not have been as written, but at least we sang something, and to be honest I think that’s more than the piece deserved. (Sorry Bingham. It might grow on me. Eventually.) And once it was over we got to reward ourselves with the Wreck of the Hesperus, which was loads of fun.

Even the stress of the Bingham paled into insignificance next to the tension at the interval, when we discovered that our changing room at the back of the balcony was locked, with all the second half music inside. What were the chances we could sing the Bruckner Mass from memory? We were hastily comparing notes (“Yes, it definitely starts with Kyrie …. something …..”) when the church verger calmly removed her shoes, scaled the walls of the church, abseiled from the roof, crashed through the changing room window, and blew the door with some plastic explosive.* She is clearly a true Bruckner fan. The second half was saved.

So we’re now into rehearsing for our final concert of the season – Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius at the Barbican on June 22nd. Rehearsals have been going really well, and it is going to be a stunner of a concert. But just when we were being lulled into a false sense of security, David-the-Conductor was struck by a vision at Wednesday’s rehearsal. Part of the score is written for double choir, but due to the practical difficulties of getting a large choir to change formation on stage during a performance, it’s never really performed as a double choir. Well, as all our stalwart fans know, the Oriana laughs in the face of practical difficulty. Let’s face it, we began one concert with children lying in piles in front of us pretending to be dead, so do you really think a simple thing like shuffling about the stage is going to thwart us?

Unfortunately we don’t have a completely unblemished track record when it comes to moving while singing. Anyone that came to our Christmas concert will remember our efforts to process into the church while singing. The plan was to enter in formation, and surround the audience with the sops on one side, the altos on the other, and the men at the front. Or the back. Or something. We actually ended up with the sopranos in the middle of the bass section, which was quite a feat given that there are about five times more sopranos, and I didn’t see the tenors at all so I think they might have accidentally processed out of the church and into Costa Coffee next door. Let’s just say it wasn’t a complete success, so there is a certain level of nervousness about trying to manage another complicated manoeuvre with the whole Barbican watching. But I have every confidence. If we made it all the way to the end of the Bingham without stopping, we can accomplish anything.

*There may be an element of poetic license in this description.