News and information for members

News and information for members of
THE REALLY BIG CHORUS
www.trbc.co.uk
Issue 24: Spring/Summer 2015
published twice a year by Scratch Concerts Ltd, PO Box 4211, Bath BA1 0HJ
Dear TRBC Members
Welcome! Please turn the pages to
find out what’s been happening
recently with The Really Big Chorus,
and what’s coming up in the
months following. If you’ve
recently joined us, welcome to our
world of singing!
 Frances Hook talks about




winning the Hallelujah Chorus
auction at Messiah from Scratch®.
Our Scratch® Youth Messiah is
shortlisted for a prestigious
music education award.
New choral destinations:
historic Nuremberg and the
breathtaking River Douro.
Royal Albert Hall repertoire in
2015: The Armed Man and
ticket information for Messiah.
Our Summer School in August
will include an evening with
John Rutter. Still time to book!
Did you receive either of our two
interim e-Newsletters? If not,
that’s because we don’t have a
current email address for you. See
page 3 for what to do about it!
Best wishes to all from
The TRBC Team
Forthcoming dates
Recognition for the Scratch® Youth Messiah
As those of you receiving our eNewsletters will know, our
Scratch® Youth Messiah has been
short-listed in the nominations for
‘Best New Classical Music
Initiative’ in the Music Teacher
Awards for Excellence – the Oscars
of the music education
world.
The challenge of
how to draw
more
young
people in to
sing with TRBC
was one which
had been exercising us for a
while. In February 2013 a change
in circumstances at
the Royal Albert Hall
offered us the opportunity to put on a performance of
Messiah for young people on the
same day as Messiah from Scratch®.
After a flurry of phone-calls, a
great deal of head-scratching and
many late nights, the concept of the
Scratch® Youth Messiah was born. A
neat formula allowed each choir to
choose exactly how much of
Messiah to learn, enabling inexper-
ienced choirs to take part alongside
those who already knew the work.
But would choirs want to join in?
Fortunately they did and, both in
2013 and 2014, over 1,000 young
people – some of them no more than
6 or 7 years of age – signed up to
sing at the RAH. Each
concert has been superb,
and it has been a
real inspiration to
watch the young
people singing
with so much
enjoyment and
enthusiasm.
The winner
of the award,
chosen by public
vote on Classic FM,
will be announced
during a ceremony on the
evening of 12 March. With competition from the likes of the BBC’s
‘Ten Pieces’ we doubt we can win,
but it has been a tremendous filip
just to be nominated: to have our
idea recognised and celebrated. If
you voted for us – thank you!
Please keep a beady eye on our
website after 12 March for the
announcement of the result!
Sing w
ith us!
Booking is fully open for all events
10 May 2015: The Scratch® Rutter Requiem. We regret having been obliged to cancel this event and its
associated workshop on 25 April.
12 July: Singday® 2015 – The Armed Man. Karl Jenkins’ millennium commission, so evocative of modern sectarian
conflict, makes a welcome return to our Royal Albert Hall programme; Brian Kay conducts.
11–16 August 2015: The Scratch® Choral Summer School. Our 2014 Summer School was such a hit that we’ve arranged a
repeat: an in-depth study of Brahms’s beautiful Ein deutsches Requiem (in the original German) with a performance with
professional orchestra in Coventry Cathedral. Brian Kay will be in charge, plus a guest appearance from John Rutter.
14–21 October 2015: The Scratch® Danube Delight. If you wanted to relax and sing your way down the River Danube
then you have missed the boat which is full with a waiting list! Sign up quickly for the Douro in March 2016 instead.
29 November 2015: Messiah from Scratch® and The Scratch® Youth Messiah. News of both events inside.
2–6 December 2015: The Scratch® Christmas in Nuremberg. It’s Christmas market time again – this year visiting the
historic medieval city of Nuremberg (the setting for Wagner’s wonderful opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg). Join us
to sing, shop and explore, with seasonal music under the direction of Jeremy Jackman.
23–30 March 2016: The Scratch® Easter Escape. Our singing cruises are now so popular that they sell out within a few
months of going on sale. Our privately chartered boat will sail in a leisurely fashion east from Porto into the heart of
the Portuguese wine-growing area. See page 3 for further details.
Sing with us!
www.trbc.co.uk
Our details in brief
Our postal booking address.
Tickets for all events are available from
PO Box 4211, Bath, BA1 0HJ,
England.
Our website. Find much more
about us at: www.trbc.co.uk.
TRBC on Facebook. To join the
community, see panel below. TRBC on Twitter. See panel below
for how to follow us. Our travel partner. Specialised
Travel Ltd deals with bookings and
looks after all the travel logistics for
our trips overseas: www.STLON.com.
Our telephone booking line.
Offered by ChoraLine (Music
Dynamics) for some of our Royal
Albert Hall concerts (not Messiah
from Scratch®): 0845 304 5070.
SUMMER SCHOOL STOP PRESS We are delighted to announce
that JOHN RUTTER will be the special guest at our second Choral Summer School,
presenting an informal evening of anecdotes and singing. A booking form is enclosed with this mailing, so come and join us, with Brian Kay and Chris Finch, for
an excellent week of music, friendship and fun. Full timetable on our website.
One off the bucket list
Frances Hook shares some of the elation she felt on 30 November 2014
when she won the bid to conduct the Hallelujah Chorus. She is pictured
below as the auctioneer declared her the winner (photo: Chris Christodoulou)
Discount Music
ChoraLine (Music Dynamics) offers
a special 10% discount on performance CDs, scores, and ChoraLine
CDs for TRBC Members. Shop at
www.choraline.com , click the
COMMUNITY tab across the top
and select the Concerts from
Scratch option.
No computer? You can still
benefit from the discount.
Telephone ChoraLine on 0845 304
5070 and just mention Concerts
from Scratch to save your 10%.
My Bucket List : conduct the Hallelujah Chorus in the Albert Hall, 30th
November 2014 – TICK!
As soon as I saw the auction mentioned on the website, I said ‘that’s
for me’ – but not all on my own! I asked my singers (I conduct half a
dozen amateur choirs here in Normandy) if they would support my bid,
and we got on the ferry with 80 friends and choir members and €2400
promised. OK, I did go over the top a bit (I’m famous for it), but it was
worth every penny, and all for the British Heart Foundation, a Very
Good Cause. What a thrill! Messiah has been so important to me since I
first heard my chorister brother Clive sing it in Bristol Cathedral in the
1960s, and it has always been a joy to sing and to conduct.
I studied singing at the Birmingham School of Music, before it got
posh and became the Conservatoire, and then worked as a classical
session singer in London, often with the BBC Singers and as one of the
octet at St Mary’s Bourne Street. In 1991 I left the UK for Coutances to
bring up my three sons in the French countryside, and found that there
was little choral tradition here; I’ve been working on that ever since. We
Anyone can join this group which
is called ‘The Really Big Chorus love The Really Big Chorus and often come over in July with a group,
but this is the first time we have been for Messiah – and what a first time!
Singers and Supporters’.
To stand on that podium, to feel the energy and joy of so many
For regular updates singers and audience, and the wonderful orchestra – it was truly an
why not follow us incredible moment. which will stay with me for the rest of my life. Only
@ReallyBigChorus problem now is what’s next on the bucket list: let’s aim high again –
sing Schubert’s Ave Maria for the Pope?
and tweet about us
to your friends?
SCRATCH CONCERTS LTD registered in
England and Wales No. 2740803.
Registered Office (please note, this is NOT an
address for correspondence):
141 Englishcombe Lane, Bath BA2 2EL
VAT number: 133 0052 73.
THE REALLY BIG CHORUS and CONCERTS
FROM SCRATCH are operating names of Scratch
Concerts Ltd.
Rutter Requiem, RAH 10 May 2015
It was with great regret that we found ourselves obliged to cancel the
concert scheduled for Sunday 10 May at the Royal Albert Hall. With
40 years experience of promoting concerts we have very accurate records of the pattern of ticket sales, and it became apparent even before
Christmas that not enough singers shared our enthusiasm for the
event and it would be unwise to proceed.
Those of you who were disappointed not to be singing with Jeremy
Jackman can still do so on our Nuremberg Christmas Market trip in
December, and the Douro Cruise next March. Details on pages 3 & 4.
Another river – another exclusive TRBC boat
As our Scratch® Danube Delight is
already completely sold out, still
with almost eight months to go before
the Amadeus Elegant departs from
Passau with TRBC members on board,
we make no apology for offering
another cruise to tempt you away
during the Easter holidays in 2016.
Portugal’s Douro River is less than
a third the length of the legendary
Danube, but packs some spectacular
scenery (see left) into its mere 560
miles. Flowing deep within the
country’s port-wine region from its
source in Spain, the river sees little
in the way of urban life until it
reaches Porto on the Atlantic coast.
Instead its route is flanked by
spectacular terraced vineyards,
olive groves and almond orchards,
with the pink and white almond
blossom clothing the valley sides in
February and March. Expect to see
medieval towns, quintas (wine
farms), castles, Easter processions,
wine-making and traditional arts
and crafts.
Oh – and there’s some singing too!
A delightful Salve Regina by Haydn,
an attractive short anthem Lift up
your heads, O ye gates by the cruise’s
musical director, Jeremy Jackman, and a
book of King’s Singers favourites
usefully arranged for SATB instead of
the usual six male voices. Jeremy will
keep you entertained all the way to
the Spanish border and back again.
Our last two cruises have both
sold out well in advance – don’t let
this one sail without you!
Messiah 2015: availability and seat pricing
Bouncing emails
Royal Mail posties can generally
deliver a letter no matter how many
misprints the address contains;
email, by contrast, allows no room
for error. If we misread someone’s
hastily written order form and type
a hyphen for a dot, or ‘e’ for ‘l’, the
emails will be undeliverable. A mistake like ’hotmial’ can quickly be
rectified when the email bounces
back, but other errors are less obvious and we usually have no option
but to delete them.
Those of you ’signed up’ with us
to receive email communications
should have had two e-bulletins
from us recently: in November and
January. If these didn’t land in your
in-box, then yours may be one of
the couple of hundred addresses
which bounced back as undeliverable. Please send an email to
[email protected] restating
your correct email address (remember to indentify yourself with your
name and postcode), or follow the
‘update’ link on the front page of
our website: www.trbc.co.uk.
Email providers occasionally tell
you to switch addresses; some customers at virgin.net had this treatment quite recently. Remember to
tell us, please, if your email changes.
Although Messiah from Scratch® in November 2014 was a wonderful occasion (not least because of Frances Hook’s spectacular performance on the
podium – see left), we were all aware of empty seats in the Stalls where, in
previous years, there would have been singers. We are now obliged by
the rules of the Royal Albert Hall to hire their premises on what is called
an ‘ordinary let’, which reduces our ticket allocation from 5,300 seats to
3,800. We did our best last year to buy back from the RAH Members as
many seats as they were prepared, individually, to sell us, although this
added enormously to Annie Hastings’ work as Box Office Manager. We
will do the same in 2015, although Members’ seats bought by us and resold to you are, regrettably, subject to another layer of VAT. We also cannot be sure how many tickets will be available via this route: in 2014 some
Members’ seats were not returned to the Hall until it was too late to notify
you they were available; some were not returned at all.
We are doing what we can to improve things for this year, although we
cannot increase our official quota of seats. As it was primarily singers we had
to turn away in 2014, we have agreed with the RAH that all the Stalls seats
allocated to us will be designated as singing seats, which will be sited, as
usual, in two large blocks towards the Stage for sopranos and altos. Stalls
seats will be available for audience, but not from us; they must be purchased directly from the Hall, and their availability will depend on how
quickly the RAH Members return them to the Box Office. We can still sell
you audience seats in the Arena and in the Circle, and in a few Boxes.
In order to give the Royal Albert Hall more time to contact Members to
try and persuade them to sell their seats to us, there may be a delay before
we acknowledge receipt of your Messiah booking. We shall still fulfil ticket
orders strictly in the order in which we receive them, but the process will
begin slightly later. This will give us a better idea of what is available.
We are also making a cosmetic change to how the seats are priced. As
an example, last year a Downstairs singing seat cost £35; for 2015 there has
been a small increase to £36, but this figure now incorporates a £5 ‘booking
fee’, so when your ticket arrives it will show a face-value of £31 – the price
excluding the booking fee. We would like to
stress that this is purely an administrative
change, and will not materially alter the
amount you pay for your ticket. Booking fees
apply only to Messiah from Scratch® at present,
not to any of our other concerts.
The Armed Man –
start counting!
We don’t mean how
many beats in a bar
(although there are places
where that would come in
handy). Instead we want you to
count to raise money for the
National Autistic Society, which
will be the beneficiary from programme sales and collections at the
RAH on 12 July.
Previous fundraising ideas
entailed quite a lot of organising
on your part: a quiz evening or a
cake sale. This one is simple: all
you need is your score of The
Armed Man and the willingness to
part with a fiver. You have to count
how many times, from cover to
cover in the full vocal score, the
exact phrase l’homme armé appears
(the words can be in italics or
roman, and in upper or lower case
or a mixture). We’ll tell you on the
website how to pay the entry fee
and submit your answers; we’ll
also include details when we send
your tickets. On the day, the first
correct answer drawn after the
interval will be awarded a prize.
(Members of the TRBC admin team,
the promotions department at Boosey
& Hawkes and the NAS team will
agree on the correct answer, and will
not be allowed to submit entries of
their own!)
Other charity news
Three events on which to report since the
previous Newsletter. The end of November
brought us the double concert, with the
Scratch® Youth Messiah in the afternoon
in support of WaterAid, and Messiah from
Scratch® in the evening supporting, as
ever, the British Heart Foundation.
The young people raised money for
WaterAid via their ‘bottle it’ scheme – a
simple idea where you fill up a symbolically
empty water bottle with whatever coins it
can take. The charity walked away with a
profit of £4,360 – more than double their
total in 2013 – with more choirs taking part.
Messiah from Scratch netted £10,280
for the British Heart Foundation, which
included £2,600 from the Hallelujah Chorus
auction. A good result in the current climate.
In Krakow, all ticket sales from our performance of The Armed Man were donated
to the work of The Albertine Brothers, a
local charity working with homeless people.
Just over €800 was raised.
Christmas is coming . . .
. . . and so is another of our hugely popular Christmas Market trips, this
time to historic Nuremberg, the centre of the German Renaissance,
where there has been a Christmas Market since the 17th century (Bath
and Birmingham have a long way to go to catch up!). The artist Dürer
(1471–1528) was a native of the city, and the composer Pachelbel
was born and died there. Nuremberg’s other historically famous son is
Hans Sachs (1494–1576), the central figure in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In a more sombre vein, the city was also the centre for
the pre-war Nuremberg Rallies of the Nazi Party and, in a deliberately symbolic gesture
after the war, the site of the Nuremberg Trials.
Returning to cheerful topics, anyone who joined us in Cologne or Bruges will find much
of the music for Nuremberg familiar, and we will try and arrange for learning CDs/MP3
files to be available for some of the newer arrangements (like Adam’s Nuit Divine). Our
accompaniment will once again be from a combination of brass quintet and organ, and the
man in charge is Jeremy Jackman (above) who drew such excellent results from TRBC singers
on both our previous Christmas trips. The Christkindlesmarkt itself is famous for its
handicrafts and culinary delicacies – an ideal place to do your Christmas shopping. We will
sing in the market, as well as our evening concert in the Gustav Adolf Gedächtniskirche.
PLEASE DON’T send post to our registered office in Englishcombe Lane! Mail sent
there may take weeks to reach us because it is NOT the street address ‘behind’ the PO Box
number. Use the PO Box address to contact us every time.
Website feedback thanks for your input
As we are planning a fairly major
overhaul to our website, we thought
we would canvass your opinions
on what was good and what was
less good about the current site.
Anyone receiving our e-Newsletters
has already had their say and given
us helpful feedback. Others can
still give their views: just follow
the link at the end of this article.
What you thought. The results so
far have been interesting. It was
pleasing to learn that most of you
like the content, and feel that we
give you plenty of useful information. Your criticisms were largely
reserved for our booking system
(’so last- century’) and the difficulties you have in contacting us. We
are addressing the latter, but there
are real problems changing the
former because of the way card
payments are regulated.
Using email. It is now possible to
contact us by email (via the website) to update your details and
join our mailing list, and we are
increasingly using email for correspondence, especially with singers
from overseas. Using the postal
system is cumbersome if you need
to arrange flights and accommodation for a large group of people
and need information quickly. The
use of email will gradually
increase, so please continue to
send us your email addresses, and
remember to tell us if they change.
Online booking. With our current
ticketing system, we take payment
from your credit or debit card
when we know the area (Stage,
Stalls, Boxes, Circle) in which you
will be sitting. In the early stages
of booking this is fairly simple but,
as more requests come in, we need
to juggle carefully how many
singers we can fit into each section
and which voices – soprano, alto,
tenor or bass – those singers will
be. As each area fills up, we have
to offer you alternative seats at a
different price. The strict regulations which govern online sales
mean that we cannot charge your
card unless we supply something
which is precisely defined at the
time of booking. This means that
we cannot take an online card
payment if we might not be able to
supply the seats you want. Nor
can we define the moment when an
area becomes ‘sold out’ because we
can often, say, move a few basses
to accommodate some extra
sopranos. We’ll keep looking at
this issue but, until we find a
system which offers the total
flexibility we need, we have to
stick with the arrangements
currently in place.
Take the survey. There’s still time
to tell us what you think. Type in
the link shown in the box below.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/C6MZJVW