The Choir Sunday, Jan 8th

[DracoM]

Cutting edge Radio 2, Aled.
Will have kept your seat warm over there.

Technical skill in singers allied to banal and cliched nothing music. That's R2. That's Aled Jones and now Radio 3.



Pah!

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

listening in car found the singing rather drab never mind genre and technical stuff ....

[ardcarp]

To be fair, I do think The Choir aims to include all sorts of vocal 'genres', not just the stuff we anoraks on the Forum (and I include myself) know and love. Pete Churchill is an interesting guy; a formally trained musician but with a great interest in jazz and cross-over. I believe he had a hand in designing the jazz syllabus for the Ass Board (but I may be wrong about that). If you look at the clip on The Choir web page of him rehearsing The London Vocal Project, you will see they concentrate on a soft blended sound with a lot of body expression (black music largely sung by whites!) and don't (with one notable exception) have their heads in scores.

Personally (and here's the anorak speaking) I find much of what they sing too repetitive and I've had enough after the first two or three minutes. One could say that about the currently fashionable minimalists, and I'm not sure which 'genre' I'd choose to be locked in a concert venue with for any length of time.

[decantor]

I switched on in hope, and soon switched off in despair. That's the anorak's right and remedy.

[DracoM]

Yes, exactly, it's the repetitive anthology of vocal tricks. Once you've heard them and thought 'clever', and then we sashay through another hour or so of them, they get a bit tedious, no matter how accomplished the singers are, and their skills I am not gainsaying in any way.