Performances of "Complete Works"
The choir has many concerts throughout the year
A male choir is what we would call a repertoire choir; that is, it works on, and sings a variety of pieces during the concert season. Risca Male Choir usually works on a repertoire of more than sixty pieces during the year, quite a considerable amount, in any case, for an amateur choir.
From time to time some male choirs may avail themselves of the chance to perform a complete work, maybe a commissioned piece, but to my certain knowledge this is more unusual than normal. Taking time out to rehearse a large scale piece can involve a considerable amount of work and in the end the piece may only get one performance: most choirs would consider this a waste of time.
With Risca Male Choir things have been somewhat different, and over the years we have sung a number of complete works, including complete suites of pieces: more of that later on.
The first complete work we tackled was the Organ Mass by French composer, Charles Gounod. Not a great piece, but quite approachable and only, as the name implies, needing an organ accompaniment. Huw Tregelles Williams was our accompanist for the first performance which attracted a lot of local attention. As a result, we were asked to perform the work as part of the liturgy in a couple of churches in Newport. This was quit an experience, watching the mass taking place while we sang the relevant parts of the service.
In 1987 we commissioned our first work which was to be a suite of five pieces, settings of Elizabethan poetry, by Richard Roderick Jones. The melodic and harmonic language was not easy, but we had worked three of the pieces in time to include them in the programme for our first Californian tour. Later that year, in the Annual Concert, we performed the complete suite, Her Triumph. It was the only time we performed the complete cycle, but the three pieces, numbers 1, 3 and 5 of the work we performed on many occasions.
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