Hugely important moment for the Chichester Singers

They will be offering Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius in Chichester Cathedral on November 13 at 7.30pm featuring Diana Moore (mezzo-soprano), James Oxley (tenor), Ossian Huskinson (bass) and Southern Pro Musica.

Musical director Jonathan Willcocks said: “This is a particularly important moment for us and the choir is shaping up wonderfully for something really exciting.”

The choir has emerged from 18 months of lockdowns and frustrations in exceptionally good health, Jonathan says. They have even enjoyed a strong influx of new recruits.

“When lockdown happened in March 2020 we were literally only eight days away from having a big concert in the cathedral. We had planned it all but obviously it couldn’t happen. The last concert that the choir did was Christmas 2019. Obviously one of the big frustrations was that at the time no one knew how long the disruption would last. We replanned that particular concert for later in the summer because naively we thought lockdown and the pandemic would be relatively short, and then we had hopes that we could do the concert in September last year and then of course numbers of infections started to climb again and so that was not possible. When it became clear that this was going to be a long haul, the challenge for everyone, and particularly for me, was to try to maintain the spirit of the choir and the sense of involvement and to do whatever activities we could. During lockdown we had to think creatively. We did two what I call selfie-video projects. We had all the choir members that felt brave enough to do it and they sang their parts unaccompanied to a master track and then we put all the individual recordings together to do these two pieces, effectively self-videos. For both we had about 100 singers participating.

“Singing is obviously a group activity. People feed off each other. To sing by yourself is obviously entirely different, but it was good to get together in that way and then we started doing Zoom rehearsals just to keep everybody involved but again the reality of Zoom is that it is impossible to sing as a group. It simply doesn’t work even for ten people let alone 100. So for the rehearsals all the participating members had to be on mute. They could hear and see me but they could only hear themselves.

“I thought over a period of time people would get fed up with this because it was frustrating and so limited, but right the way through they kept going. There were two periods where we could have live rehearsals, but these periods were interrupted again by another lockdown and so most of last year was rehearsing by Zoom. But the great thing is that the majority of people still kept coming back.”

And now the reward is that they have been able to rehearse for real – for a real concert: “And we have had a bumper crop of new singers wishing to join the choir. Each year the choir is constantly renewing because people move away or retire from singing or whatever and each year we generally have between ten and 15 people wanting to join but this year we had 24 people applying which is great. Within weeks we were right back up to full singing strength and it was fantastic.”

The Elgar is a significant choice: “I was determined that our first concert back would be a really fantastic piece that everybody could feel confident with. It has to be my favourite choral work to conduct. I love the music of Elgar. I was born in Worcester, the city which is so closely associated with him, and I have always felt a great affinity with his music. The additional attraction is this was the very first work that I conducted with the choir, way back in May 1979, 42 years ago.” chichestersingers.co.uk