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Concert Week(2)–Adapting to the Orchestra and the Hall

Today, I spent a total of 5 hours rehearsing among the Chorus, with the Orchestra, soloists, and children’s choir.  It’s usually a fairly big adjustment to move into the hall where we’ll performing.  The space is far larger than our usual rehearsal space.  So the ways of singing that work for a  smaller space aren’t quite right for larger one.

Even more, the conductor is now farther away.  So, the issue of coordination become much more evident.  It’s a bad habit of amateur singers to listen to the accompaniment [usually piano] rather than to follow the conductor.  In the larger hall, with the conductor much farther away, it was a real problem.  It wasn’t until we really focused on the baton rather than on the echo of the sound from the hall that the music really started coming together.

The orchestra for the Orff contains two pianos, a huge amount of percussion, as well as the usual strings, woodwinds, and brass.  Given the size of the orchestra, it would take a chorus of 200 to provide the appropriate balance of sound levels when they’re going full blast.  But, we’re only 100 or so, so there are times when we just can’t produce the volume of sound necessary.  So there was a significant amount of time spent on adjusting the orchestra to what we could do or, contraiwise, encouraging us to sing out–when asking the orchestra to quieten would significantly change the character of the music.

One additional problem was that the stage is a traditional proscenium.  So, in some ways, it seems like we’re singing from the back of a cave. 

But, as our chorus motto explains: “Whatever happens, we planned it that way.”



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