By James Ihaka 4:00 AM,
NZ Herald Thursday May 6, 2010
Rhondda Garland says everyone can sing.
Photo / Natalie Slade
Choir teacher Rhondda Garland is
serious when she says everyone can sing, or at least hit the right note
with her help.
"Maybe not like Pavarotti - that's
probably a bit too ambitious - but I can certainly help people to keep a
reasonable tune," she says.
"There are very, very few people who
cannot sing. I often get children who sing in a monotone, but they just
haven't learned how to get their voices up and down, that's all."
For the past 18 years the 61-year-old
former nurse from Avondale has heard a whole range of voices - "some
really good" and "some not so good that definitely got better" -
teaching hundreds of children the finer points of choral singing at the
Auckland Children and Youth Chorus at the Mt Roskill Baptist Church.
A singer with the Auckland Choral
Society for nearly 20 years, Ms Garland has always loved working with
children, so combining that with her musical passion to work with three
youth choirs once a week seemed on song.
"We will take any child that wants to
be there," she said.
"It can be a challenge - you get some
kids who come in and think 'I can sing' and they can't so it's a
challenge to teach them how to get a nice sound."
Ms Garland has been nominated for the
Herald Unsung Heroes series by Helen Ashton, a parent of one of her
choir singers.
The series recognises the often-unseen
work people do in their communities. Five of the nominees will be chosen
to go on a P&O Cruise.
"I just love that she believes that
everyone can sing," said Mrs Ashton.
"It allows for possibility and
potential to be realised and that, like anything, anyone can become good
at whatever they do provided they practise enough."
A long-time member of the Girls
Brigade, Ms Garland juggles her choir commitments with part-time
administration jobs and caring for her 86-year-old mother, who recently
lost her sight and lives alone in her New Windsor flat.
She has recently started mentoring two
teenagers who want to teach singing.
She also helps to organise trips for
children in the choir, many of whom, she says, are not from affluent
backgrounds.
"[They're] good kids - we work hard
but we have a bit of a laugh."
The New Zealand Schools
Choral Festival is an annual international high school choral festival
and competition where Northern Hemisphere and Australian choirs stay and
perform with our New Zealand choirs. We welcome mixed-voice choirs,
treble-voice choirs… (our high school choirs are aged 13-18). The
festival offers northern hemisphere school choirs a safe, exotic,
quality choral summer school joining a large group of Australian, New
Zealand other international choirs. This event involves our own Deputy
Music Director, David Hamilton. Click the logo above for more
information.
Review:
Daring flourish marks end of successful concert year!
By
William Dart
NZ Herald, 15 December 2009
Auckland Choral's Messiah is
a major event in our city's musical life, marking the close of the
year's concert season and a particularly successful 12 months for
Auckland Choral under the directorship of Uwe Grodd.
With Miranda Hutton leading the strings of Pipers Sinfonia, the familiar
Overture proved an irresistible welcoming, its Allegro
bubbling over with Handelian energy.
If David Hamilton's
Comfort Ye was occasionally wanting in robustness, few tenors could
match his daring final flourish in Ev'ry Valley and dramatic
presentation of Thou Shalt Break Them.
Morag Atchison, never less
than musicianly and remarkably nimble tackling the coloratura of
Rejoice Greatly, was burdened with an intrusively tight vibrato that
seriously undercut her subtly decorated I Know That My Redeemer
Liveth.
Wendy Dawn Thompson, last
seen swooping around the Aotea stage on a Segway as Rossini's
Isabella in The Italian Girl in Algiers, showed a rare ability to
cut straight to the emotional core of her arias.
One felt the weight of every
word in He Was Despised, with some utterly spellbinding moments
when her burnished mezzo floated unaccompanied throughout the hall.
Jared Holt gave a
workmanlike performance but was uncomfortable in the lower register,
failing to muster enough rage for Why Do the Nations or create
the requisite wonderment in The Trumpet Shall Sound.
Grodd's year with the choir
has been a good one. From the lilting clarity of And the Glory to
the final resounding Amen, there was a real engagement with
Handel's score.
Two choruses, rescued from
the cutting-room floor, showed the singers coping well with sturdy
counterpoint. Grodd took risks too, stressing those extraordinary
textural shifts in Glory to God with memorable results - only in
Behold the Lamb of God were there twinges of insecurity.
While Pipers Sinfonia gave
of their very best, the evening would have been much poorer without the
two continuo men, John Wells and Indra Hughes.
Both provided apt and often
ingenious musical commentary, Wells' harpsichord making us feel the
sting of the smiters in He Was Despised and Hughes' chamber organ
offering an insouciant ramble around the fringes of All we like sheep.
Sacred Masterpieces: Haydn, Mozart
and Hummel
By
William Dart
NZ Herald, 2 November 2009
Insanae et vanae curae is a curiosity
in the Haydn catalogue, a storm-tossed chorus rescued from his
aria-heavy oratorio, The Return of Tobias.
It made a suitably celebratory work
for Auckland Choral's Amadeus concert, with the full forces of the
hundred-plus singers and Pipers Sinfonia behind it. Uwe Grodd marshalled
it all with his customary enthusiasm, although occasionally the men of
the chorus sacrificed focus for gusto. Some phrases sounded closer to
the Finnish shouting-choir tradition than what we expect with the First
Viennese School.
Mozart's Coronation Mass brought more
refinement and so, when words like "Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum"
were punched out in the Credo, they made a real impact. In the later
Sanctus, the "Hosanna in excelsis" had an attractive lilt to it.
A quartet of soloists blended well in
the "Et incarnatus est" with Patricia Wright standing out, particularly
in her Agnus Dei with its uncanny premonition of the lovelorn Countess's
"Porgi amor" in The Marriage of Figaro.
After interval came the Australasian
premiere of Hummel's Missa Solemnis, which Grodd premiered on disc back
in 2003.
Hummel is one of a number of composers
caught, as it were, in the shift from classic to romantic. For this
generously proportioned work to register fully, it needs sturdier
orchestral playing. The choir was tonally patchy, with too many passing
glitches in the ensemble, although the soloists (Wright, Kate Spence,
Derek Hill and Stephen Bennett) were a sonorous foursome.
Hummel's Agnus Dei was eight superb
minutes, propelled on a series of poignant suspensions. This movement
fully deserved the enthusiasm of Allan Badley's programme note and the
choir sang with an appropriate fervour.
An Overflowing Holy Trinity
Cathedral: Pounamu and Vivaldi's Gloria
Tuesday August 04,
2009
By
William Dart
Opening up its annual "subscribers' bonus concert" to the general
community was a shrewd ploy on the part of Auckland Choral. The
result was as predictable as it was deserved with musicians playing
to a packed Holy Trinity Cathedral.
 Setting off with a taste of Kiwi, David Hamilton conducted Helen
Fisher's Pounamu, a fragrant meld of European and Maori
sensibilities.
Uwe Grodd's flute spun its own mystical rhapsodies and then wove and
flickered through Fisher's often sumptuous choral textures.
With an eloquent soloist in Kate Spence, this was a performance that
captured the calm, glisten and shimmer that the score's central
waiata sings of.
Hamilton's own Orpheus, a tribute for the Haydn bicentenary, was
based on a poem by the American William Jay Smith.
After a robust start, with a bracingly confident choir against John
Wells' sometimes tumultuous organ toccata, Hamilton carefully drew
out specific words and images through his music. Spence's shapely
melodic line was beautifully turned, especially when the poem
transported us to places extra-terrestrial.
There were passing moments of choral thinness, but the final
combination of vibrant vocalising and instrumental splendour were
the perfect celebration of both Haydn and the composer's singing
colleagues.
Talking splendour, Vivaldi's Gloria is a prime specimen of the
Baroque variety, born of the same spirit as Handel's Zadok the
Priest. Taking over the baton, Uwe Grodd ensured that Vivaldi's work
lived up to its name.
Kate Spence and soprano Lilia Carpinelli duetted well, Carpinelli
impressing with a clear, unaffected soprano voice and Spence using
her lustrous tone to advantage in numerous solos.
The drive and thrust of the opening chorus was not to be resisted
and nor were the conviction and resonant singing of Qui tollis
peccata mundi and the mighty fugue of the final Cum sancto spiritu.
Grodd also inspired some of the best playing
that I have ever heard from Pipers Sinfonia, with outstanding
contributions from oboist Alison Dunlop along with the untiringly
ingenious harpsichord stylings of John Wells.
Auckland Choral at
Auckland Town Hall:
The Creation
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
By
William Dart
Auckland Choral's The Creation was an
imaginative contribution to the Haydn bicentenary as well as being a
welcome opportunity to hear a work last performed in this city eight
years ago. This is one of the monuments of its genre. Influenced by
the popular oratorios of Handel, The Creation has Haydn setting
texts from Genesis, the Book of Psalms and Milton's Paradise Lost to
express his wonderment and faith in Mankind.
Uwe Grodd and his musicians certainly
caught the freshness of Haydn's score, even if the opening
Representation of Chaos had its insecure moments. However, from
James Harrison's authoritative opening recitative, with its simple
but effective choral refrain, we were caught up in this marvellous
score.
With Auckland Choral joined by the young
voices of the University of Auckland Chamber Choir, the great
optimistic choruses like The Heavens are Telling stunned as
intended. The more testing weave of the later Achieved is the
glorious work also held no fear for these singers.
Pepe Becker is a soprano with Early Music
allegiances so, not surprisingly; she allowed herself the occasional
ornamentation here and there, her voice rising clear and true above
the orchestra in arias like With verdure clad.
 Kenneth Cornish's
scrupulously moulded tenor was apparent from his opening Now vanish
before the Holy Beams although he was not always as successful as
Becker in penetrating through the orchestra. His aria, In Native
Worth, immaculately
phrased, would have benefited from more vocal bloom.
 The lightish bass voice of James
Harrison made for complete audibility as far as texts were concerned
and he also has a keen appreciation of Haydn's shapely lines,
although the recitatives in which he introduces the newly-made
creatures of sea and land, cried out for more dramatisation.
The only severe disappointment of the
evening came not from the musicians but from The Edge. A delay of 20
minutes was brought about through inefficient box office procedures
and patrons were permitted to enter during the performance, one
scampering none too lightly across the hall in front of us - an
intrusion that is an insult to the audience, the musicians and,
finally, to Haydn.
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