Easter Week Music

As most people know this coming Sunday is known as Easter Day. To a lot of people it means a holiday, to others, spending time with family, others, Easter eggs and the Easter bunny and to others a religious story of Christ's sacrifice. The week before Easter day in the liturgical calender year is known as holy week. On Good Friday, for Christians, its a day of reflecting that Christ sacrificed his life on the cross, to suffer for the sin that we commit each day.

Now every year on Good Friday for the past four years the church choir I sing in has performed "The Passion according to St John", by J.S. Bach. This for me is a wonderful opportunity for me to continue one of my great passions, church music. As this piece of music was originally written in German we sing in German. This can be quite a lot of fun and can also be a bit confronting, especially with the faster movements with words requiring difficult articulation. Tonight we had our first rehearsal with the orchestra and it went quite well. There is a lot of things that we surely can improve on both as a group and also individually. We rehearse again tomorrow and then on Friday we perform.

I attended a concert during my lunch on Monday which was also "The Passion according to St John", but by a different composer, Schutz. It was performed by a group of five people, most of whom are a part of the Scots Church choir. Its not actually often that I get to be on the listening end of a performance and I must say that they were very good. There were parts were a couple of the parts were a little inconfident of the pitch and timing was slightly out (which I'm sure would have been resolved with some more rehearsal time) but otherwise a fabulous performance and another job well done.