As well as my weekly recording session for the church choir, I have recently made a couple of ‘distanced’ recordings for other choirs. This procedure is happier for me than Zoom rehearsals. I have now worked out why I don’t sing well at these rehearsals – it’s because in order to get my mug in shot, I have to put the device quite low, and because the conductor is on it I tend to bend over to sing into it. If they resume in the autumn I will experiment with other set-ups. With a recording, the device shows a reflection (if not a mirror image) of my face and I’m not tempted to sing at it, or at the conductor who is on the screen of my phone in one hand. As I’m holding the music in the other hand, I have yet to work out how to turn the pages, though it always seems to work!<\/p>\n
One of my two recordings is Bogoroditse Devo<\/i> by Rachmaninov<\/a> for Bristol Choral Society, which was straightforward enough. The other is Vaughan Williams’ Let all the world<\/i><\/a> sung by people associated with the Three Choirs Festival and the cities where it takes place. This provided the unusual experience of being conducted in performance by someone I’ve never actually met in person. Every conductor has a different way of doing this piece, and its changes of tempo kept me on my toes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As well as my weekly recording session for the church choir, I have recently made a couple of ‘distanced’ recordings for other choirs. This procedure is happier for me than Zoom rehearsals. I have now worked out why I don’t … Continue reading