Mayfield Festival Choir Society

Pays de Bray

Chris and I had a meeting with the representatives of Pays de Bray in June. They are very keen to see a collaboration come to fruition. What they are suggesting is that they would provide an orchestra/brass group for a concert to be given in Mayfield in May 2011. The same concert would then be repeated in France twice: one performance would be given in either Rouen or Beauvais cathedral. Many of us will recall a wonderful concert we performed in Rouen cathedral some years ago in collaboration with this same group. The funding would also subsidise the travel involved. The next stage will be for Graham to meet with their Director of Music in London to work out the programme to be performed. Not only would this be a really interesting opportunity for the choir but as the funding will pay all the costs of the orchestra and because we will keep the ticket receipts from the Mayfield concert it will also provide much needed financial support for the choir.

David

Graham has already said all there is to be said about the last concert in his message ‘Twin musical peaks of the Baroque’ which was sent out after the concert on 3rd May. Photographs taken at the rehearsal and concert can be found here. However I would like to thank you all for the extra work which you put into the preparations for this concert. There is no doubt that it was a great achievement to sing those two works in one concert and it was satisfying to bring it off so well. It was my first concert as Vice-Chairman and I would like also to thank the Committee for all their hard work. There is an incredible amount of hard graft to be done by a handful of people behind the scenes to present these concerts and it is easy to be unaware of this when you just turn up to sing every week. Having enough money in the kitty is always a worry and we do need more, so Chris (Treasurer) and I are preparing leaflets to help us recruit more sopranos and tenors (see Graham’s note about Auditions below, which will apply), and more Patrons, and we will need your help to achieve this, as well as doing your utmost to sell more tickets. A week before the concert on May 3rd ticket sales looked really bad but we were saved by a last minute surge. However we will be relying enormously on good ticket sales for the November 1st concert to cover our costs. Details of our future concerts are below and I hope you will agree that it looks like a varied programme which we will all enjoy singing and the audiences will enjoy listening.

Maura