‘Important’ moment for city’s singers
The Chichester Singers return for one of the most significant concerts in their history – their first for nearly two years.
They will be offering Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius in Chichester Cathedral on November 13 at 7.30pm featuring Diana Moore (mezzosoprano), 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 selfievideo 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.”
The Elgar is a significant choice as they return to concert-giving.
“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.
Tickets on ticketsource. co.uk/the-chichester-singers