This Tuesday saw the Chorale's first rehearsal in our new home at Northcliffe Church, where the higher ceiling meant we lost the echoing acoustic of our old rehearsal space and sounded less like we were singing in the bathroom! We had some additional members this week for Messiah and it was great to see a couple of extra men (although we could always do with more, so if you sing tenor or bass and fancy singing with us check the website, http://www.bradfordchorale.org.uk for details.)
I have to admit, I began to feel slightly out of my depth this week with a couple of the pieces we rehearsed. There's so many long runs of notes that if I didn't really concentrate it was easy to completely lose track of where we were (and my rubbish sight-reading was no help at all). Paul's solution to fudged entries - lose the words - and suddenly it made more sense, made us all sound slightly mad, using 'be' throughout, but it really helped to get to grips with some of the tricky phrasing without worrying if everyone was getting their p's in the right places. Thankfully, 'For we like sheep' is one of the harder pieces we're doing in this version of Messiah.
Speaking of which, we found out the running order of pieces that will make up our Messiah, so the mild panic I felt when I read the listings page (53 pieces!) calmed as we're doing 13 of them.
* I am joking, Handel knew what he was doing...
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