Rehearsal

This evening was a rehearsal for the music we will be singing on our choir 'tour' to the Languedoc' area of France at the end of August.  We are there for a week and have performances scheduled for almost every evening, including a Mass first thing on the Sunday morning.  It is always great fun and eight of us are sharing a villa with pool close to Pezanas; others are staying round about in various venues. 

 As you can imagine, we spend a lot of time eating and drinking during the days and after the performances. It always amuses me that we spend our days out and about, gather together at a pre-arranged time for a rehearsal in the venue, rapidly change into our concert 'black' wherever we can and then magically pull out wonderful sounds in amazing acoustics.  We will have done quite a few rehearsals back here in the UK!

In rehearsal I was sitting opposite the sopranos (being in the alto ranks) and not many of the sops were actually watching the conductor - to be fair he was actually accompanying us at the time so no hands were waving in our direction.  I found I was paying more attention to the reflections I could see in the piano than the notes on the pages in front of me so I got out my compact camera and grabbed the shot; then I could concentrate!

A few of my observations on choral singers:
sopranos rarely have the right music or their glasses and can't cope if they haven't got the tune or happen to be singing at a lower pitch to another voice,
basses are always a bit behind the beat and frequently check the dynamics required by the conductor, even though it makes little difference to the forte they will sing anyway,
tenors query whether they should be singing first or second and often need to go through their part several times, whilst
altos spend a lot of time talking during all this because we know our notes (usually only four or five in various combinations), have the right music and our glasses, are ready to come in at the right time and there are loads of us!

I'm sure that any basses, tenors or sops among you will be affronted!