Tonight’s rehearsal was led totally by Katy, which was great for us altos as Kate then sang with us. It’s always good to have our numbers boosted. With Katy at the piano we did about 10 minutes warm up and then we started with ‘Heave Away’, which was a choice of one of the sopranos. It’s a great arrangement but apparently we didn’t put enough oomph into it. Maybe we were still warming up.
Next we worked on ‘O Waly Waly’, a beautiful old folk song of undetermined origin, could be Scottish, could be from Dorset or somewhere else even. Wherever it’s from I think we all enjoyed it. We spent quite a while on this, progressing through the first 3 pages and we’re looking forward to getting to the end in a future rehearsal. The song is in 3 parts, which is different to a lot of what we do. As the tenor and bass are the smallest parts of the choir I think it made a difference that both parts were singing together.
The third song we sang through was ‘The Long Day Closes’. We had done this about 18 months ago so it wasn’t new to most of us and Katy seemed pleased with how we sung it.
We then worked for a while on Katy’s arrangement of ‘You Know Me’. How exciting to sing a Robbie Williams song! We started at the end of the song, which we sometimes do and later when we’ve put it altogether it all makes sense.
We finished off by singing 2 songs, which we’ve worked on quite a bit, ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ and ‘Drive my Car’.
We certainly did a lot in this practice and so much variety. I think we all went away feeling we’d worked hard and feeling uplifted.
Written by Sue Bradley