The choir of Chichester Cathedral will be heard as part of Coram Boy, the second production on the main-house stage at Chichester Festival Theatre this summer.
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00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Always lovely
00:06 to speak to Charles Harrison, Organist and Master of the Choristers at Chichester Cathedral,
00:11 but especially so today because you've got a really exciting new project with the Festival
00:15 Theatre. Your choir, the Choristers, are contributing to the second main house production of the
00:20 Chichester Festival Theatre's summer season, Coram Boy. Now what is it that the Choristers
00:25 were asked to do through you? The play is set in the 1750s and two of the main characters
00:33 in the play are Cathedral choristers. The great George Frederick Handel also makes a
00:38 brief appearance in the play. So music is a thread that runs through it. We were asked
00:44 to record about 50 minutes of music as part of the soundtrack for the play. So there will
00:50 be live musicians, so our contributions will be spliced in to what they're doing live during
00:59 the production. And all of this music is either inspired by 18th century pieces such as those
01:08 by Handel and Purcell, or indeed in some cases actually taken directly from their work. So
01:15 there are little excerpts from Messiah that we recorded for this.
01:18 Oh, it sounds fantastic. And was this out of the usual run of things for the choristers
01:22 to be doing this music? Yes, our usual job is to sing lots of services,
01:28 over 200 of them in the Cathedral. So anything that takes us away from that usual routine
01:35 and offers something fresh and interesting, it's always exciting to do that.
01:39 Even at the end of a long day of school? Well, it was a long day, yes. So we started
01:43 at half past six and it was a two and a half hour session. So I think we're all a bit jaded
01:47 by the end. And recordings inevitably involve lots of retaking, attention to very fine details,
01:55 the sorts of details that microphones pick up even when the human ear doesn't. So it
02:01 does call for quite high levels of concentration. The recording is a lot less forgiving, is
02:06 it then? Yes, it is. Well, typically a congregation
02:13 in the Cathedral are sitting some distance from the choir, and the Cathedral acoustics
02:16 do a wonderful job of warming up the sound and just covering over some of those little
02:21 infelicities. And there's none of that with the recording. The microphones are right in
02:25 front of us and there's absolutely nowhere to hide. So things really do have to be absolutely
02:29 spot on, rhythmic, in tune, finely polished and honed.
02:32 Fantastic. And it must mean a lot to the choristers because the Festival Theatre is a venue that
02:38 they know well, isn't it? Yes, they love the annual run of Christmas
02:43 concerts at the Theatre. They know what large audiences attend those and how many people
02:50 go there for all these main productions. So they're fully aware of how important this
02:56 is and how widely their efforts will be appreciated. Fantastic. And they enjoyed doing it, no doubt?
03:03 They certainly seemed to, yes, and that they were up for the challenge and while demanding.
03:08 And there was a lot of retaking and polishing and very tiny adjustments to be made. They
03:15 handled all that with great professionalism, even quite late into the evening. So I think
03:19 we're looking forward to hearing the results. Well, congratulations on having done it. And
03:22 it'd be lovely in the audience to sit there thinking, this is Chichester Cathedral Choir.
03:27 Fabulous. Thank you very much indeed. And good to speak to you, Charles. Thank you.
03:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]