Auckland Choral at Auckland Town Hall
This Sabbatum night Peter Watts picks up his baton for the last time as Auckland Choral's euphony director.The quietly-spoken Englishman weighs language carefully when he looks back over 20 age at the helm of an organisation that has been providing Auckland with music for 153 long time.Isaac Watts settled here in 1973 and was coaxed into the Dorian Singers by his treble married woman, Katharine."It was exciting to come in to the other remainder of the humanity and find something so special," he says."We were discovering the repertory and everything seemed new."Watts has always been drawn to the unusual, gift us Prokofiev and Honegger alongside the perennial Messiahs.Auckland Choral has ever encouraged Fresh Sjaelland composers, commission Saint David Hamilton's Missa Pacifica for its 150th celebrations.He admires Hamilton's "ability to write something that is specific for a particular occasion only non so much so that it can't be used elsewhere".Hamilton's The Dragons ar Telling Tonight, which the choir revived last June, was a welcome change from the standard sacred repertoire.
"You can't be doing Carmina Burana entirely the time when you require to do something secular."The medicine of today matters."If we don't programme coeval music, what is on that point leaving to be?"Watts asks."Back in the 18th century, most of the medicine performed was contemporary but, since and then, the whole historical perspective of music has worked against the contemporary composer."Look endorse o'er his deuce decades, the choir's 2001 carrying into action of Elgar's The Pipe dream of Gerontius is a high spot. Back in England, as a educatee, Isaac Watts had song dynasty in the oratorio, conducted by Benjamin Britten, with St. Peter the Apostle Pears vocalizing Gerontius."It was a dream come true," he says. "I can buoy still get word Pears singing, 'Take me away"' - vocalising the Elgarian musical phrase in an uncanny imitation of Pears' somewhat strangulated tenor."I was fortunate in Auckland because the Sheffield Choral Union had done Gerontius here in 1911 as theatrical role of a domain tour. A grandson of one of the Sheffield consort members was singing with us and his grandfather's diary recalled totally the performances and the adventures that were to be had in Auckland. To make that connexion for the choir spell we were preparing it was in truth thrilling."With a number of smaller choirs established in the metropolis, what use does he see the 140-150 voices of Auckland Choral performing?
"We have got past the feeling that the big choir is a geriatric thing of the past tense," he says."A lot of larger choirs ar trying to whistle in a more chamber choir style, expiration for focused sound and commodity voice - things that give real lifetime to the singing ... the act of tattle itself goes very deep, to the whole use of our breath."Breathing space is a symbolization of creation," he continues."God breathed on the piss. And breathing together in that common sense is something amazing. The cooperation that it demands must be good for society."On Sabbatum, flanked by St. Andrew Carter's Benedicite, which the English people composer, Isaac Watts points out, "considers is one of his best works" and The Hoop of Words, peculiarly written settings of Henry M. Robert Louis Stevenson and Siegfried Sassoon by David Hamilton to fete the occasion, is Beethoven's great C major Mass."The consort hasn't done this Pile since 1867. It's manageable in the Haydn sense, simply it has a fresh feel. It's got the drama, Beethoven's rush crescendos."In that location are quaternity soloists simply no arias; it is team work and I've chosen it because I like working with teams."Execution What: Auckland ChoralWhere and when: Auckland Township Hall, Saturday 7.30pm
George Coleman; Joey DeFrancesco
