Fernhurst Choral Society revive pre-pandemic plans for summer concert

For their summer concert this year Fernhurst Choral Society return to the piece they would have performed in the pandemic summer of 2020.

Transcript

00:00Good afternoon. My name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor for Sussex Newspapers.

00:06It's really lovely to speak again to Tim Revald. Now, Tim, a Musical Director for the Fernhouse

00:11Choral Society, you've been with them astonishingly 14 years, and it's a happy choir. And you are

00:19performing your summer concert to close the latest season, Handel, Samson, Saturday, June the 7th.

00:27Now, how has the season been, this latest season, with them?

00:32Well, this season has been great fun. I can't believe it's been 14 years, and I can't believe

00:38that they're not getting sick of me, but if they are, they're very kindly not showing it.

00:44It's been a really interesting season for me in many ways. I took the first term off with paternity

00:51lead, and our wonderful accompanist George looked after things absolutely marvellously between

00:58September and November. And I returned in November with a choir in extremely good spirits,

01:08and we've been gently working on Samson since January. Handel's Samson written just after he wrote

01:16Messiah and actually really just as good as Messiah, if not quite as well known.

01:21Yeah. And the work that you did on Samson actually began in January 2020. It was going to be the summer

01:28concert, wasn't it, five years ago?

01:31It was. It was indeed going to be our summer concert in 2020. And for reasons I probably don't need to

01:38explain our season ground to a crunching halt in March 2020, and that concert never happened.

01:47And it seems extraordinary that it's taken us five years to finally get around to performing this work,

01:54but for various reasons it has. And we're really looking forward to finally closing that circle.

02:01And just to be doing it now, to do it for real, must stir a few memories of the pandemic. It probably

02:08makes you think that you've done incredibly well to still be here as a choir and to be doing so well,

02:13despite that horrible 18 months, two years.

02:17It was, looking back on this, a pretty horrible time to be trying and indeed failing to run a choir.

02:23Having said that, we kept the choir together on Zoom. And I don't quite know how we did it,

02:32but we did. And I suppose there was so little to do and so little opportunity to go out and do

02:40enjoyable things that an hour and a half singing into your smartphone screen on a Monday night was

02:49probably better than not doing so at all. But it was absolutely brilliant.

02:53That counted for more surely, wasn't it, than trying circumstances to have had that connection.

02:58And lovely that you can now do it. And it's a challenging piece, isn't it, you would say?

03:05It is. It comes with some of, for the chorus, it comes with perhaps similar challenges to Messiah.

03:11Some of the choruses are very quick. They require a great vocal dexterity and skill.

03:21Some of them are very slow, full of great sadness in some ways. And they're equally difficult to pull

03:30off truly convincingly. The chorus has to demonstrate a quite remarkable range in this work,

03:37and our choir is doing so really well in rehearsals. I'm looking forward to the performance.

03:42Fantastic. Well, it's Fernhurst Choral Society, Handel Sampson, Summer Concert,

03:48Saturday, June the 7th. Tim, lovely to speak to you. Congratulations on the work with the choir

03:54and congratulations again on the paternity. Thank you.