The Best Choruses In The World ... Ever

As I said yesterday, I have some reservations about this claim (where's the Anvil Chorus? the Soldiers' Chorus from Faust? Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves? Dies Irae from Verdi Requiem? The main bit from Beethoven 9? Grand March from Aida? Polovtsian Dances? I Was Glad? I could go on...). But in the meantime, here are a load of mp3s of the stuff for this gig. As usual, they'll be taken offline after the gig and are provided for personal study. If I've missed anything out, someone please tell me!

Ave Verum Corpus (Mozart) (4.0 MB)
Wie lieblich, from German Requiem (Brahms) (8.0 MB)
Bridal Chorus, from Lohengrin (Wagner) (6.2 MB)
Easter Hymn, from Cavalleria Rusticana (Mascagni) (6.2 MB)
Agnus Dei, from Requiem (Fauré) (6.6 MB)
Hallelujah Chorus, from Messiah (Handel) (4.5 MB)
Humming Chorus, from Madame Butterfly (Puccini) (3.4 MB)
Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring (Bach) (3.3 MB)
Dies Irae, from Requiem (Mozart) (2.2 MB)
Lacrimosa, from Requiem (Mozart) (4.1 MB)
O Fortuna, from Carmina Burana (Orff) (3.3 MB)
Soldiers' Chorus (Verdi) (2.0 MB)
Sanctus, from Requiem (Verdi) (2.8 MB)
Zadok the Priest (Handel) (6.8 MB)

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Hi all - just a brief note to apologise for not being at last night's rehearsal. I went to sleep instead, having only had a total of about 2 hours' sleep since Sunday... I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer! However, I do now have a new job (starting in September) \o/ It's here, and I'm very much looking forward to it. Also extremely relieved!

I'm told that the rehearsal was spent on Zadok, O Fortuna and the Sanctus from the Verdi Requiem. (I still can't work out why it's the Sanctus that's been included and not the start of the Dies Irae, but there you go. I'd have said the latter was far more of a popular classic.) Dr Liz says she was too busy giggling at the back to note any Jamieisms but she thinks there weren't any. Naughty Liz, I hate it when people do that! Clearly I need to make sure I am there next week so I can glare reprovingly :p However I will forgive her because she was the ONLY person who remembered my interviews and texted to say good luck :-)

I do have mp3s of the things for the choral pops concert, but I haven't got round to putting them online yet. Hopefully soon. Along with a Take That report...

Bimm bamm bimm bamm bimm bamm....

No more Mahler 3 for us for the foreseeable future. Good gig in Sheffield last night though. The City Hall has no acoustic at all, so it felt very different to the lovely Bridgewater Hall. But we did get to watch the first movement this time, from front of house, and then went onstage after that. (There were strange notices backstage saying "this concert uses offstage performers - SILENCE IS NOT AN OPTION"... We presumed it meant "silence is mandatory", but it wasn't clear!)

EDIT: I forgot to mention the two extremely small and cute Manchester Boys' Choir boys who presented bouquets to the soloist and Mark. Mark's face was a picture! Wonder why they didn't get them to do it on Thursday?

Poor Gillian had a fall on arrival at the City Hall. I didn't think it was too bad at first - she sat through the rehearsal, although Wendy was doing physio on her back for part of it (this baffled many of us at first, because we couldn't see why Wendy was sitting on the floor!) - but by the start of the concert she was lying flat on her back in the changing room, being examined by a paramedic and about to go to A&E. I hope all is now well - does anyone know?

My main achievement of yesterday - apart from buying an interview suit - was finding my way to and from the correct Sheffield car park without getting lost in the one-way system. I've gone wrong here so many times in the past that I made very sure I had a printout of my planned route before I set out. I have it saved on disk now, so next time we go I'm sorted :-)

Anyway, I haven't forgotten about Take That (how could I?!? Mmmmmmmmmmm, Take That) but they'll have to wait a bit longer as I'm trying to plan two lessons for my two interviews - both on topics I haven't taught for years - and also get all the latest educational terminology to stick in my head. (The latter is easier, because my current headteacher is very on the ball and mentions the latest stuff all the time.) With a LOT of luck, by Wednesday night's rehearsal I'll have a new job - fingers crossed!

(Oh, and for those who are wondering, the monkeys in the picture are Lisa, Liz and Rachel!)

Quick PS

About the coach to Sheffield... it will now be doing a pickup at the Gun in Hollingworth at 3.50 pm tomorrow (and a dropoff there on the way home). If anyone's plans will change as a result of this news, please let Naomi or Rosy know (or me if you like - I'll pass the message on).

Only review of last night that I've seen is the MEN one, which (as Barbara pointed out) merely mentions - AGAIN - that the choir was THERE! Robert Beale seemed to like it, but can anyone suggest what we can do to get him to actually write something proper about us?

Oh, and I was offered three interviews today \o/ Sadly I could only accept two of them, because two were at the same time as each other. But fingers crossed! One is on Tuesday and one on Wednesday.

Es sungen drei Engel... und neun Hörner

OK, I admit that those aren't the Hallé horns. But how often do you see a picture of 9 horn players together... with Swiss mountains in the background? I was reminded of this picture tonight, when it was the first of the Mahler 3 gigs. The horns are definitely my favourite part of the symphony, so it was quite right that they got to take a bow as a section.

The gig went rather well - there was a standing ovation at the end (although, to be fair, it did coincide with people standing up to leave... but I think most of it was genuine) and Mark got more curtain calls than I can remember for years. I'll be interested to see the reviews! I think everyone is looking forward to doing it again in Sheffield on Saturday, but it's never the same as in Manchester!

Not much else to say at the moment - off to bed soon - other than that it seems that loads of people are doing the People's Chorus thing. My music arrived today - I'm a tenor in choir 3. Sounds as if quite a few Hallé people are in choir 3 - I hope they've got some good people in the other choirs to balance us!

Oh, and Graham E kindly sent an mp3 of Mark getting his RPS award.

More tomorrow. Maybe. Including - maybe - the much-delayed Take That report, which Abi reminded me I promised ages ago. In the meantime, to balance the Verbier horn section, here are the Verbier timp players :-)

"Like a glass of lime juice after a chocolate pudding."

I don't think this is a literal translation of "Lustig im Tempo und keck im Ausdruck". (Well, in fact I know it's not, because the score tells us that means "Merry in tempo and bold in expression".) But it's how Mark Elder says the 5th movement of Mahler 3 should be. (He also said "you're here to give simple, direct pleasure", which I kind of liked the sound of but wasn't sure how to do, and that we were to be, above all, cheeky. Cheeky, we agreed, is easier. Although I had to restrain Gill from doing Cheeky Girls impressions for the rest of the rehearsal after this instruction...)

EDIT: I forgot to mention the oboe! In the few bars before the 5th movement when the choir joins in, there is a prominent oboe cue. But he played it in a really weird way - with a strange tone and a glissando from the F to the A. Never heard an oboe do that before - and I'm an oboist! Never heard Mahler 3 played that way before either. Am fascinated as to whether it's a Mark invention or whether Mahler wanted it that way. The direction in the score is 'hinaufziehen', which means 'approaching from below'... which I suppose could be interpreted like this...

EDIT 2: A couple of people asked me to find out which way the coach will be going to Sheffield on Saturday. I have enquired, and unfortunately the coach will be unable to stop en route, so the route is a moot point. Sorry.

I have to admit that the thing that amused me most tonight (which was the piano AND orchestral rehearsal for the Mahler, in case you were wondering) was the repeated mention of the word "Keck!" (which is German for "bold") However, you have to be a World of Warcraft player to understand why this is so funny, and I suspect that the Hallé Choir/WoW intersection is an extremely small group... You'd be surprised how many random visitors come here looking for "orcish translators", though, so I may as well point out that if a Horde player says "LOL" (in Orcish) it appears as "kek" to Alliance players. (If there are any WoW players among the choir, can I direct you to my WoW reference page? And in particular to the LotR-WoW animated gif linked from it, which features the funniest ever use of "kek"...)

That last paragraph was possibly the saddest, geekiest one ever, wasn't it? Sorry about that :p I'd better regain the attention of my non-geeky readers by pointing them to a couple of interesting features from the Guardian and the Observer - one about a tone-deaf woman trying to learn to sing 'Happy Birthday', and a great speech about why we should talk more about the music we listen to. (You may have to register to read those, but it's free and well worth the effort.)

Need to sleep soon - only just got home, because there was a committee meeting after the rehearsal (quite a productive one). Couple of things to point out before I go, though - firstly, after the live baseball on Channel 5 finished in the early hours of this morning (about 4 am), I was flicking through the channels and was very surprised to suddenly find the choir on TV! BBC4 were repeating our Gerontius thing from the Proms. Hadn't noticed that in the listings. (And, before you ask, I'm still being promised DVDs of that... yes, really...) And finally, our gig on Thursday is live on Radio 3. Not sure who I'll be able to persuade to listen when it's also Big Brother launch night :p

"It's not a bass moment, it's a man moment!"

Sorry for the delay in posting, folks, I seem to have spent every spare minute this week (and there haven't been many) filling in job application forms. Number of jobs applied for so far: 9 (with 10 more applications ready to be filled in in the next few days). Number of schools that want to meet me: 0. Days until I have to hand my notice in if I want to be elsewhere in September: 18. Argh! But I will persevere.

The title of this post is a Jamieism from Wednesday night's rehearsal. It was during the Dies Irae of Mozart's Requiem (oddly enough, so are all the other things I wrote down, although we also did the Lacrimosa, Mahler 3 and Zadok the Priest. And the men did Schoenberg. Sam showed me his copy - it's only a couple of pages long! And they appear to be in unison throughout. It doesn't look quite as hard as I'd expected (although it certainly doesn't look easy), but a lot depends on the harmony underneath, and since I was looking at it while Mozart was going on, I couldn't really hear Schoenberg in my head!)

This was Jamie's justification for getting the tenors to join the basses on what I think of as the "cars on the motorway" bit. (If you can't see why, I should probably point out that it's the S/A/T backing vocals that inspired this analogy - which I do not claim to have invented, by the way, it was Stuart Beer, a previous choirmaster of mine - and not the bass part.) There was also much amusement at "It might have been the last note he wrote!" [this was the last quaver of page 15] "He might have lifted his head from his deathbed and said 'The altos need a quaver!' ... They need a lot more than that..."

Oh, and also "Can you vibrate more? ... I don't know why my eyes were drawn to the altos..." and "We've got to stick knives into this audience. Gently!"

What else was I going to say? Oh yes, the People's Chorus has sent out emails to those who've applied. I imagine everyone got accepted, because the website is now saying they have room for more. So if you haven't done anything about it yet, do go and sign up. I'll be joining the tenors on the day, because I thought I'd be helpful and put on the form that I could sing tenor if necessary, and they've said "yes please". (I just had a tiny inkling that they might be short of tenors - and guess what, they are!)

Talking of tenors, apparently it was the lovely Paul Brennan who did the dramatic nose-blowing at last week's rehearsal - he came to confess!

Oh, and I forgot to mention that we have two new 2nd altos. Well, not new to the choir, but new to the part - they were promoted from the 1sts. Some would claim this to be a demotion, but what do they know? :p I don't remember anyone ever moving to 2nd alto before, although loads of people have been moved from 2nd alto. Maybe Jamie finally noticed how depleted our numbers had become... but for whatever reason, it's great to have Kathy and Catharina joining the best part in the choir :-)

Dr Liz is keen for me to write about Take That (mmmmm) and I did plan to, but I'm falling asleep again so they'll have to wait a bit longer. So I will leave you with this blog post I discovered, which may interest the Beatles fans among you. It's a guy listing not his favourite Beatles songs, but his favourite *moments* in Beatles songs :-)

"The Hallé Choir sounded luminous, as confident as it was sensitive."

Independent review of the Fauré.

In unrelated news, this story may be of interest, if only for the allegation "no-one wants to sing in choirs!"

And, I saw Take That tonight. Mmmmmmmm :-) May write about them at some point, but right now I'm going to sleep to dream about them :p

"He wants a devout sit!"

(That's Mark's instruction for the start of the last movement of Mahler 3, as relayed tonight by Jamie. I can't wait to see people's attempts at this...)

A fun rehearsal tonight. With quite a few LOL moments. The biggest was one where you probably had to be there - during Ave Verum, when Jamie said "Basses, you've got the danger note in your part. We're in what key?", and somebody blew their nose, really loudly :-)

Another was Jamie saying "My tongue gets in there much sooner than yours, ladies!" ... and I can't even remember why! But it was definitely during Mahler 3, not long after he said "What d'you call the thing that hits the bell?" and Gill suggested "The donger?"

I must say it was great fun to sing Mahler 3 again. I expect some of the sops are a bit upset not to be singing the top part (the Youth Choir girls are doing that) but if so they kept it to themselves. I gave out (to the 2nd altos) copies of the single sheet copy I did last time we sang it (when we had to learn it from memory - I can learn things quicker if they're on a single sheet). I was horrified when it was pointed out that I'd missed out one of the repeated "bimm bamm" bars... no-one noticed last time! Now I'll have to copy it again! On the plus side, it does show that the current 2nd altos are more observant than the ones who went to Verbier :p

The most fun part of Mahler 3 tonight, actually, was Jamie's jazzy piano accompaniment to figure 6. He only played it to make us stay in time, but it was great. Possibly better than what Mahler wrote!

At the end of the rehearsal, Jamie gave us a quick rundown of what we're doing next season (normally Mark or Geoff Owen would do this, but they were both unavailable and TPTB wanted to inform the choir ASAP). I hesitated about mentioning it here, because in the past we've been asked to keep the info to ourselves until the press release. But no such instruction was given tonight, and in any case Graham tells me that the info about the new season is already in the public domain (although not on the Hallé website yet, I just looked). So here you are:

23rd September: Daphnis and Chloe (Ravel) with BBC Phil & Gianandrea Noseda
14th October: Psalmus Hungaricus (Kodaly) AND Beethoven 9, with Mark Elder, and soloists including the tenor Stefan Margita (his website doesn't work for me; maybe it doesn't like Macs)
27th October: Survivor from Warsaw (Schoenberg) - with BBC Phil & Gianandrea Noseda, men only, in Hebrew!
December: Messiah with Nicholas Kraemer
December: Carol concerts with Jamie
11th February 2007: Mozart's Mass in C minor with Mark
6th May 2007: a French concert with Mark, ending in Poulenc's Gloria
3rd June 2007: The Kingdom (Elgar) as part of a weekend celebrating Elgar's 150th birthday and Mark Elder's 60th (both on 2nd June)

So our languages next season will definitely include French, German, Hebrew, English, Latin, and Hungarian (which Jamie says is easier than Russian, but we'll be starting it in July regardless!) Maybe Jamie will manage to get some more into the carol concerts - Spanish and Russian and Portuguese and - Italian! I've just realised that looks like a season with no Italian! That can't be good for the voice!

And finally, I feel an urge to give you some mp3s. It's been a while :-)

Mahler 3, 5th movement (4.8 MB)

Coconut (Harry Nilsson) (4.5 MB)

Manchester (The Beautiful South) (5.4 MB)

The latter two have been on my brain for weeks. The coconut one is of course because of the Lime Coke advert. The new Beautiful South song is fun, especially as it sounds at first as if it's an anti-Manchester song, but then it becomes quite the opposite \o/