It was a little strange last night, attending my first rehearsal of this session with everyone else well practised in the music.  And it felt strange singing apparently unconnected pieces rather than a big work with a single over-arching trajectory and narrative.

Anticipating the former, I had taken time to listen to all four of the main choral works during the week.  And, somewhat unexpectedly, I found some connections between them.

The Choral Medley from Bernstein’s West Side Story happened to come first. This celebrates the 100th anniversary of Bernstein’s death on the day before the concert, and is of course a re-working of Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, but with the gangs of the Sharks and the Jets replacing the feuding Montagu and Capulet families.

This connects with Shearing’s Songs and Sonnets which comprises settings of seven poems from different Shakespeare plays, in a delightful style which is part classical, part jazz.

The jazz theme is developed in Bob Chilcott’s Little Jazz Mass, a work which manages to be light-hearted yet reverential, and happy but serious.  Chilcott, one of the original King’s Singers, admits to having been greatly influenced at the start of his career by Shearing, particularly in his use of jazz based rhythms.  And the piece finishes with a great sense of peace.

And peace and love are hallmarks of Eric Whitacre’s Five Hebrew Love Songs.  This ethereal music to words by Whitacre’s then finacee, now wife, is clear and limpid as can be.  It is the aural version of watching the ripples caused by pebbles being dropped into a perfectly still pond.  And it too ends with a great sense of peace.

So, four pieces, but with interesting connections.  Each is lovely in its own right, and each has its own place in the program.  I am really looking forward to getting to know each piece better as we prepare for performance.

Saturday’s concert seems to have gone down well with audience and performers alike.  It’s the audience that matters most, and here is the view of one of its members, Lyn Turner.

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of spending an excellent evening being entertained by the Manly-Warringah Choir and Orchestra at a concert entitled Strictly Mozart. The grandeur of the Cardinal Cerretti Chapel only served to complement their magnificent performance.

Opening with the familiar Ave Verum Corpus and moving on to less well known pieces, the choir show-cased their talents and ability. They worked well together, producing light and shade, obviously aware of and listening to each other. The size of the building in no way intimidated them and they sang confidently, with a clarity of diction which left the listener in no doubt as to the progress through the Summary Libretto of the Requiem.

As a chorister in the UK, I appreciate the vast amount of work and dedication that goes into creating a performance of such high standard. It was brilliant, so professional, and I hope to hear more of them before I leave Australia.

This morning sees the posthumous announcement of Stephen Hawking’s last theory, that of Holographic Reality, explaining previously unexplained elements in the first few fractions of a second of the creation of the universe.  It’s a bit of a deep subject even for academics, and I suspect that, had I asked for a show of hands at last night’s rehearsal of people who understand the theory, the air would have been a bit thin.

Now, not only great scientists propose and prove new principles of science.  From observing the simple things of life, never mind the grand concepts, it is possible to derive all sorts of theories.

For example, have you noticed that for every person you know who is successfully losing weight, there are several who are putting it on, despite all attempts to get rid of it?  When I noticed that some years ago, I proposed the Principle of Global Body Mass.  This states that there is a fixed amount of body mass in this world, ie that if you add up the weights of everyone in the world, it is a constant number.  Any one losing weight is merely transferring their body mass to some other poor unsuspecting soul .  One consequence, which many of us may find re-assuring, is that dieting is anti-social.    Needless to say, I have not yet developed a rigorous proof of the theory, but then these modern scientists do not seem to do that nowadays either.

Another theory arising from experience, this time from a lifetime of singing in choirs, is the General Theory of Relative Performance and Rehearsal.  This states that one essential prerequisite of a really good performance is at least one really bad rehearsal.  Think back, for example, to our concert last December.  The last two rehearsals were amongst the most fractious I can remember, yet we gave two stellar performances under the direction a Carlos who exuded confidence but, deep down, must have been quite worried about his and the Choir’s reputation.

However, I think this theory is about to be disproved.   The rehearsals for the Mozart concert have been pretty good.  Not without the occasional moment, but none has been dreadful.  This week’s rehearsals have been wonderful.  Carlos has been on top form.  Orchestra and soloists have been well prepared.  The Choir knows the music reasonably well, and Carlos has been able to focus on expression, bringing out the meaning of the words to communicate the music in all its nuances to the audience on Saturday.  He was clearly very pleased at the end of last night’s rehearsal.

All we have to do on Saturday is to hold our nerve, concentrate, and watch Carlos.  If we do that, we will deliver another memorable performance.

And the General Theory of Relative Performance and Rehearsal will bite the dust.

Last night’s rehearsal was all about passion in music.  Not just about notes, but about communicating the essence and meaning of the music to our audience.

Carlos took no prisoners from either soloists or choir.  He worked us harder than usual, ensuring that we sang the words and not just the notes, putting feeling and passion into this dramatic music, which is all about those most human of experiences:  the loss of a loved one, and eventually our own mortality.  It is not something which can be dealt with apathetically: the combination of words and music demand to be treated with the respect, passion and cherishing which Carlos dealt out in equal measure.  Taking up his cue and singing in response to his direction, left us with a great sense of a job well done, and made at least this chorister return home to not only the usual quiet drink but also then an unaccustomed long night’s sleep.

Naomi has captured Carlos’ remarks very neatly in this week’s Bulletin:

• “Be confident”
• “Concentrate”
• “Make music”
• “Get into the spirit of the music”
• “Create something beautiful”
• “Look at me”

If we follow Carlos’ words, and match his passion for this incomparable music with our own, we will indeed treat our audience to another memorable performance.

No, not chromatics a la carte (ie each having our own selection) – which is possibly what Jim heard us singing at rehearsal last night, but a la Car, Nicole Car to be precise.

Returning from another stunning concert this afternoon by the ACO, I was struck by three points of resonance with Manly Warringah Choir’s forthcoming concert.

The first was their playing of Mozart’s Symphony No 27, which was the original choice of symphony for our concert.  However, as the Requiem and Symphony No 25 feature together in the film Amadeus, it seemed appropriate to settle on No 25.

The second point of resonance is about singing quietly, as Jim reminded us is the instruction at the opening of Ave verum corpus.  Nicole Car gave a master class in the art.  She sang the whole of an aria (Ave Maria from Verdi’s Otello) so quietly that at times you could have heard a pin drop, yet the music was full to overflowing with pathos and yearning.  What is more, the ACO’s accompaniment was even quieter, yet also full of musicality and meaning.

And lastly for those readers patient enough to wait until now, here is the reason for today’s title.  In two arias sung by Nicole, there were chromatic passages.  Again, as you would expect from someone who has wowed opera audiences in London and Paris and is about to star at the New York Met, she gave an object lesson in this tricky technique.  In one aria, the Ave Maria by Verdi, she sang a slow downwards chromatic passage, pianissimo and perfectly in tune.  In the second, Chi sa, chi sa by Mozart, both upwards and downwards passages featured, louder, much faster this time but still delightfully and perfectly in tune.

Why am I writing about this concert?  Well, it was an absolute delight, the sort of concert you wish would go on for ever.  And, if you read this before Sunday afternoon, you can hear the Melbourne performance live at 2.00pm on ABC Classic FM.  Should you read it later, I suspect that the ABC’s streaming service will make it available.

Happy listening!