Events Diary
Below you will find a list of events in which some of the networkers are involved. Hopefully they will provide an opportunity for you to spend a pleasant and relaxing evening. If you are involved in an event you would like to see included here, please contact the Network Coordinator.
Newbury Choral Society concert & the power of singing in recovery.
I would like to tell members about the Newbury Choral Society concert on Saturday 24 June at 7.45 at Douai Abbey. We are singing Sir Michael Tippett's A Child of our Time. It is a really interesting and beautiful work with extraordinary relevance to our time now. It was inspired by a newspaper article that Tippett read in 1938 about a young Polish Jewish boy who was seeking refuge in Paris with his family from the Nazis. His family did not escape persecution and so the boy visited the authorities and killed an official, with terrible consequences. It is written for four soloists and a chorus, and Tippett wrote his own text on the advice of T.S. Eliot. He intersperses the different sections with well-known spirituals which provide a bit of light relief and are meant to give the story a wider relevance.
Tippett is saying that catastrophic events are as much part of life as the good things that happen, but it is what we make of the experience that counts. We must accept our own dark side in order to know ourselves as a whole. One of the final choruses says 'I would know my shadow and my light. So shall I at last be whole....Here is no final grieving but an abiding hope.'
It has a particular significance for me as I first sang parts of the work in February 2005, three months after the crash, at a day-long workshop. I found it impossible to sing the spiritual 'Steal away', which is very emotional and repeats the line 'I ain't got long to stay here' (ie in this world). I got home, having held everything in all day by mouthing the words, and broke down and sobbed for an hour, much to the confusion of my family. There was another alto whose mother had just died and she was in a similar state.
I was quite nervous about how I would get on with singing this music when we started rehearsals in January, but I can say that I have never been so choked up that I haven't been able to sing. I am sure that everyone in the choir has moments when the emotional strength of the music takes over and enables you to sing it with more feeling, but our conductor told us he wants passion! As he says, there would be no point in replicating a CD recording, we have to make it our own. And there is something in there for everyone.
There will be a superb orchestra, excellent soloists and the choir isn't bad either. If you would like tickets they are available from the Corn Exchange box office 901635 522733) or you can email Liz.