Messiah by Heart

On Saturday evening we (the SSC) performed Handel's Messiah. This is pretty standard fare for choirs but in this case we did it without scores ie no music... by heart. Oh and by the way if you are late tuning into my life, this isn't some rinky-dink little church choir we're talking about... This is the Symphonic Choir and people were paying to hear us either succeed or fail gloriously.

To make a long story short, we didn't have any spectacular errors. Oh there were problems for sure. But nothing that the average concert goer would have been unnerved by. Still, maybe it's my imagination but the audience response seemed muted... well certainly compared to most of our other concerts.

The fact is that even though the group had to work harder for this work than anything we have done (Messiah is a LOT of music to memorize), without the benefit of the score, the result was below par. You lack a certain confidence on entrances without the music and this weakens the impact. For fear of coming in at the wrong time, you often fail to come in at the right time.

Quite frankly I never want to do this again. I don't regret giving it a go but it seems to be a lot of effort for the result.

What this did show me was how hard my fellow choristers were willing to work to pull this off. Those guys surprised me. I didn't think they had it in them and they really showed heart. Kudos all.

Labels: choir, music, ssc