Since we finally
joined a choir late last year in Wageningen, after 6 years of
thinking about joining a choir, we decided that finding a suitable
choir in Christchurch should be one of our first priorities. Through
an intensive internet search I found out many interesting facts about
choirs in Christchurch and the wider area.
For instance, there
is the Christchurch City Choir, a large choir of about 100 singers,
loosely associated with the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. There is
also the Christchurch City Chorus, a group of many, many, many women
who sing gospels in interesting costumes and are a particularly large
hit in the US.
Then there are many
choirs or singing groups that focus on the joy of singing together
rather than the actual quality of the singing, as evidenced by their
enthusiastic YouTube videos that look like a lot of fun, but sound
pretty terrible.
Finally I found a
choir called the Jubilate Singers, or Jubes for short, and their
videos sounded much more polished and looked like fun, but a
harmonised sort of fun. I learned that they are of the same size as
our choir in Wageningen, and looking at past programmes, I discovered
they sang a very similar repertoire too, also including contemporary
Kiwi composers.
So we joined their
rehearsals for 6 weeks until we were able to do auditions with the
conductor last Monday. This went “excellent” in Thomas' case, and
“good to excellent” in my case, because I wasn't able to sing the
middle note of chords that she gave on the piano (a very confusing
game...?!), and we are officially part of the choir now.
It is a jubilious
(?) time to be part of this choir: we will celebrate its 40th jubilee
this November with a concert that includes highlights from the 40
years and all of the still alive conductors. This resulted in a
rather eclectic mix of music, a Maori waiata to start, some baroque
Monteverdi, a series of spiritual music all starting with “Deep”
(deep peace, deep river), Mozart, Whitacre, Brahms, Faure, some Kiwi
compositions, and more. It also features quite a few languages,
Hebrew, Latin, German, French, English, and Thomas has already
recorded several pronunciation guides for the German pieces.
We will also
participate in Beethoven's Ode an die Freude, Ode to Joy, together
with other choirs (notably the Christchurch City Choir) and the
Christchurch Symphony Orchestra. We discovered that this is not
actually a joy to sing. I thought that Beethoven must not have liked
Altos for some reason, as our part is mostly singing the same
monotonous note all the time, before going all over the scale in
sudden octaves up and down, at the high end really at the limit of
what an alto can comfortably sing so that we end up shrieking
“FREUDE!!!” like mad cats and tearing our vocal cords. But then
it turned out he does that to all voice parts, and everybody is
always exhausted after singing this. Nevertheless, it is quite
exciting to sing in such a concert and we're looking forward to it.
We're happy to be
singing again and being exposed to new music, new techniques, and new
people.
