At the beginning of tonight’s practice we altos felt quite smug as we far outnumbered the sopranos, which is fairly unusual, It’s usually the other way round. However, one by one the sops started to appear. Of course this made for a much better rehearsal. All the different parts were quite well balanced by the time we started properly.
We had a lot of fun tonight as well as doing some serious singing. We started off with ‘Side by Side’ which is an old favourite for many of the members. We’d practised this quite a lot recently so we were able to enjoy it. Then we worked on ‘The Hallelujah Chorus’ which was alright for the first page but once we got to part B most of us got completely lost. We spent a lot of time on this but well worth it as I think most of us felt we could at least get to part C singing in all the right places.
Next we went back to an old favourite, ‘California Dreaming’. This is very special to me as it’s the first song we did in this choir all those years ago and also the alto part is great as we sing the tune.
We finished with ‘Corn’ which did get a few groans from the choir although we all did our best with it. I feel we’re getting there even though we still have a lot of work to do on it. It is such an interesting piece of music and nothing like we’ve done before. I think you need to hear it to believe it!
Written by Sue Bradley