Review

Saturday, 13th November: Our Centenary concert and party was at the Square Chapel Arts Centre, Halifax, on Saturday 13th November 1999. It included a performance of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, which was sung in the Society's first-ever concert. Glen Pate of the The Halifax Courier wrote:

A Singing Century Celebrated

The basics of excellent choral singing don't just happen and they don't continue without careful practice and a great deal of care about the standard of performance.

Halifax Chamber Choir has them in abundance. The group has an excellent sense of ensemble, admirably blended voices, pays close attention to the details of the performance and delivers with excellent diction.

The balance may be a bit light in the tenors but the overall sound can be captivating.

The downside, however, is that the beautiful sound qualities they displayed in their set of madrigals and Tudor music need to be expanded somewhat when they tackle later music.

The admirable good manners need to be sacrificed a little in the cause of communicating the urgency of the music with an audience and the tone colours need to be from a more varied palette.

Mike Murphy did an excellent job in getting the choir to deliver with skilled attack and phrasing but there were times when over-tardy tempi made the singing more difficult than it might have been.

You have to wonder whether the sentimental choice of Coleridge- Taylor's cantata "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast" was an appropriate one. It was sung at the ensemble's first concert and there must have been a tremendous temptation to mark the centenary with it.

But with an ensemble of only 18 voices, delivering the tone colours demanded by this powerful work was an uphill battle, made even more difficult by Brian Oakley having to take over the tenor solo at the last minute from flu victim Paul Kershaw.

The staging of this centenary concert was excellent with John Eastwood telling the history of the choir from Joe Kerrigan's script. It gave many fascinating insights into the social history of choral singing.