Singers from FCMG played a fascinating part in the Aurora Orchestra’s BBC Proms on August 1 and 2, in which the ensemble (conducted by Nicholas Collon) explored and explained Mahler’s First Symphony in a dramatised first half, before performing the symphony itself from memory after the interval. Part play (including hearing from Mahler’s own writing), part insight into the score, that first half introduced the audience to many of the symphony’s key themes. One of these is the tune of the nursery rhyme Frère Jacques, which appears in a minor key – and the evocative recording that resounded throughout the Royal Albert Hall while Nicholas Collon explained its origins and significance (before dividing up the almost six-thousand-strong audience and inviting them to sing it as a round) had been made by our own FCMG singers just a few week’s earlier.
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Sounds Sublime Festival
Our Intermediate Choir (plus a couple of guest singers from our Senior choir) performed at the Sounds Sublime Festival at St James’s Piccadilly on Saturday, July 11. Our singers were joined by members of LYC, Blackheath Halls Youth Choir and Canterbury Cathedral Youth Choir to sing together in a specially commissioned piece by composer Will Todd called Let Me Walk In Peace.
It was highly appropriate that FCMG, whose singers range from aged 4 (Dots) to 18 (in our Senior and Chamber choirs) should have been part of a festival described as a celebration of the ‘journey of young voices, from under 5s and their very first experiences of singing, to the extraordinary talent and passion of our current Genesis Sixteen choir’. It’s a member of the acclaimed vocal ensemble The Sixteen, Matthew Quinn, who can be seen in the photograph leading them in a warm up.
The Villa-Lobos event, LSO St Luke’s
A fascinating project on May 16 saw singers from FCMG take part in a multi-media performance celebrating the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, and in particular his works inspired by youth and nature. In 1932 the Brazilian composer was effectively placed in charge of his country’s music education, as part of which he published Guia prático, a set of 137 traditional folk songs for children’s chorus based on melodies from across the country’s diverse regions. FCMG singers performed a selection of 15 of these songs. Remarkably, the concert was the first time songs from the Guia prático have been performed in Portuguese by an English-language choir in the UK.
The concert – which was attended by the Ambassador of Brazil to the UK, Antonio Patriota – was organised by pianist Marcelo Bratke, whose career-long advocacy of the composer has included recording his complete works for solo piano, and who performed throughout the evening.
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