Dream and Reality

Southwell and Louth Choral Societies in  Southwell Minster
Martin Pickering - conductor
Chris Maltman - soloist

Southwell and Louth Choral Societies combined to perform Dream of Gerontius in Southwell Minster. It was a fruitful collaboration culminating in a very good performance under the direction of Martin Pickering. the choirs sounded well together and got on well administratively and socially.

Putting two choirs together is a musical risk and as Martin said in rehearsal always involves a certain amount of compromise. Through the hard work of committee members and the musical team it all worked well.

My own involvement was minimal owing to the time I had out before Christmas but it was useful to take a back seat and spectate. What could I learn? It is a learning experience to watch another conductor, how the rehearsal is organised, what it focussed on, how the pressure of time affects the procedure. Watching and listening to the singers which will inform my future rehearsals. I spent some time in the rehearsal sitting amongst the choir - a very interesting experience. As a result I am going to look at how the choir and orchestra can be rejigged to improve the two way communication between them can be improved.

Composition Competition winner

I spent a very pleasant hour on Friday with a very talented and personable young man. One of the members of Southwell Choral Society has put up the money to run a choral composition competition and the aforementioned young man is the winner of the first competition.

The competition is to enable a body of new works suitable for an amateur choral society with modest resources. There were three entries, all of which met the criteria to a certain extent. The winner is Will Handysides, a first year composition student at Trinity College in London. His successfull entry is a setting of Thomas Hardy's The Darkling Thrush for choir and orchestra. The choral parts are well written for amateur chorus with good voice leading and good cues. The orchestra parts are quite demanding but well within the capabilities of the excellent players who populate the orchestras who accompany the amateur choral tradition.

Nothing puts off a conductor more than the constantly changing time signatures (often with 5 or 7s on the top!) that most modern composers litter their scores with. Will avoids that trap - the only 7/8 is at a moment of rest - making the piece easy to conduct with very easily managed tempo changes.

We are looking forward to working on it and to a very exciting performance on Saturday, March 31st in Southwell Minster.