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Review of Summer Concert 2010

The Choir’s Summer Serenade, held on 26 June, introduced performers and audience to St Anne’s Church in Baslow.  With its handsome interior and lovely riverbank setting, there is much to commend this new venue, especially for the summer event.  Your reviewer remains to be convinced that it is the appropriate venue for all of the Choir’s concerts.

In a programme of short songs with a pronounced American flavour the choral highlights included two of the spirituals which Michael Tippett so brilliantly arranged for A Child of Our Time, his great choral masterpiece which the Choir will be singing at their concert next April.  This then was a foretaste of what is to come.  The two songs were sung with great feeling.  So also was the singing of Tchaikovsky’s The Nightingale, a simple and beautiful rendition of a traditional Russian folksong.  Other highlights included a fine arrangement of the Londonderry Air (or Danny Boy if one prefers) with its dancing piano accompaniment performed with her usual dexterity by Alison Wheeldon and the two spirituals which started the concert, Somebody’s Knockin’ At Your Door and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.  The second of these was unaccompanied, as was the case with several other of songs, and the Choir was able to achieve great harmonic balance in its quieter sections.  To be commended too was the imaginative decision to insert a work by the German baroque composer, Schutz

The evening’s guest performance split between the two halves of the concert came from Plague o’Bells, the well established local handbell group consisting of ten players under the energetic leadership of Robert Wright.  They are regular guests at the Choir’s concerts and their playing always has about it a touch of magic.  This performance was no exception.  It is invidious to select just one piece for comment: space does not permit more.  For your reviewer it was an arrangement of Bach’s Prelude in C Major.  The result succeeded in combining the composition’s simplicity of line with the purity of sound produced by the bells.  It was sheer delight.  In other works Robert and his team introduced the audience to a variety of new sounds from handchimes, mallets (striking the bells) and other techniques, all of which demanded (and received) great skill as the players swapped one instrument for another, while keeping time, observing the work’s dynamics and contriving not to drop a clanger.  Your reviewer looks forward to more from these wonderful musicians at future concerts.

The concert concluded with a rousing and foot-tapping piece called Tequila Samba, the emphasis being both on the samba rhythm and the Tequila theme to the sung words.  The audience was fully in the mood for it after a lively evening and generous refreshments in the churchyard during the interval.  Andrew Marples not only led the Choir and introduced the sung works to the audience with his customary verve but he provided a tenor solo in one of the works.  What more can a Choir ask of its musical director?

Bill Blackburne