Oh, Alarm Bell!!!

Whee! Choir reconvened tonight, after the summer break. I got the impression everyone was as pleased as I was to be back :-) Lots to do though. Maggie got everyone in the mood by starting the warmup with the Macarena. Yes, really :p

Started with the Mendelssohn thingy we'll be starting with on Sunday (for the Sing with the Hallé day). It's pretty easy - just what's needed to get everyone singing. And it prompted some early Jamieisms.... "I've been thinking about Sunday (not without fear!) ... What you could really help with, folks, is singing a little closer to the beat!" (Hmm. That one seemed funnier at the time!) Oh, and also "I heard a lot of lovely mistakes. It was a real joy!"

We had a very quick look at three of the four movements of The Bells. Not performing this till November, but it's pretty hard so it's just as well we started early. I think it'd be quite hard even if it wasn't in Russian... mind you, at least we get to work with the wonderful Xenia again (must find out what the correct spelling is). She's the "XdB" mentioned on the schedule, in case anyone had wondered. In the meantime we get stuff like "The little squiggle above that note is a tiny non-existent Y".... Isn't Russian great? :p

The Bells in question are sleigh bells, wedding bells, alarm bells and funeral bells. We didn't have time to run through the funeral bell movement, but we did all the rest. The alarm bell movement was by far the hardest, but I very much enjoyed Jamie's extremely dramatic reading of the lyrics to prepare us for it! I feel that the 2nd altos (of course) won when it came to singing as many of the notes as possible. Many of these were totally incorrect, of course (at least from me) but we like to be enthusiastic :-) (When I was at school the Director of Music's motto for choral singing was always "LOUD AND WRONG!" and I have tried to follow his advice ever since.)

Right at the end we read through the second half of Belshazzar. I'm absolutely delighted that we'll be doing this seated in two choirs, as we haven't the last few times we've done it, and it's just not the same. We had the 2nd sopranos behind us tonight, which was a pleasant change (and an added bonus in the fact that they didn't talk incessantly... although the few 1st altos who usually make it really hard to hear anything did actually shut up a bit in the second half, presumably as a result of Jamie pointing out that they make rehearsals unnecessarily unpleasant for those near them - so yay!)

More tomorrow, when there'll presumably be the first half of Belshazzar, the last bit of The Bells, and maybe even a bit of Zadok....