The WemsFest Choir launches with three concerts with Quimantú

SussexWorld

A brand-new choir has been created for an exciting musical collaboration which will see concerts in Chichester, Leigh Park and Portsmouth.

Transcript

00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers.

00:06Lovely this morning to speak to Rachel Panton, who is the Joint Artistic Director of Keemantu,

00:10which is an Anglo-Chilean-Dutch band based in the UK, and you've got a really, truly

00:16exciting project. You're working with community choirs in various locations, but the really

00:22thrilling thing is you have, in this area, a choir which has been created specifically

00:28for this project, the WEMSFest Singers, which is quite something, isn't it? You approached

00:33Mark Wingwood at WEMSFest to ask if he wanted to be part, and you have a new choir as a

00:40result.

00:41Yeah, Phil, yes, so it's been a really amazing journey. I was looking at my notes and it

00:47was probably more than a year ago when we first talked to Mark about bringing the project

00:54into WEMSFest and working with WEMSFest, and he immediately embraced it and said,

01:02we've got two fantastic local choir leaders down here, Emily Barden and Laura Blake, it'd

01:08be great to get them on board, and why don't we actually work with a new choir, former

01:15choir from existing singers in the area, because there are a lot of choirs in the area already,

01:23but by forming a new choir, it's a way of creating kind of bonds and community across

01:29different areas to really enhance what the project's going to be doing, which is sort

01:36of bringing new people into contact with each other.

01:38That sounds fantastic. We've got three concerts coming up in April, May and June in Portsmouth,

01:44Leigh Park and...

01:47Chichester, yes, we've got Chichester first, yeah, then Leigh Park Haven in May, and then

01:55we finish up at Portsmouth Cathedral. And the exciting thing about the Portsmouth one

02:00is that we will be also bringing in two of the other choirs that are working on the project

02:06elsewhere to join that. So I think by the time we get to Portsmouth, we'll have about

02:12close on to 100 singers for that.

02:15And the piece you'll be singing is The Miner's Mass. What is that about?

02:20So the Misa de los Mineros is a work that was composed by Mauricio Beníguez-Astorga.

02:28Mauricio is the director of our group, Key Mantu, and he composed it using the kind of

02:36heritage and kind of spiritual traditions of the mining community that he's from in Chile.

02:45So it's written in Spanish and follows the structure of a mass, but the kind of words

02:53are kind of essentially sort of poetic words that he has written to express the different

03:00movements. There's seven movements in it, and each one has a different rhythmic style

03:07from Latin America. We use different instrumentation. So you'll hear in the concerts, as well as

03:14guitar, violin, string quartet and piano, you'll also hear the bombo, which is an Argentinian

03:22drum from the Andes, and you will hear the charango and the ronroco, some stringed instruments,

03:30the quena as well being played. And those will give a kind of like a Latin American flavour

03:38that unites with the Western classical side of the string quartet in the work.

03:46Two solo singers as well, Mauricio and his daughter Laura are the solo singers for the work,

03:53and then these fantastic singers from the Wemsfest Choir, who are sounding wonderful.

03:59They've just done such a brilliant job learning the piece and kind of engaging with the different

04:05rhythms and the different musical styles, learning Spanish. We've had a really great

04:13few sessions working on the Spanish pronunciation as well with them, and they've just been doing a

04:20great job and they're sounding fantastic. We had a rehearsal last night and were blown away. It's

04:25great. Well, it sounds a truly exciting project, especially as a by-product, as a brand new choir.

04:31Really lovely to speak to you. Yeah. It goes brilliantly. Thank you. Thanks, Phil.

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