• Join us and expand your musical horizons
  
  
• Rehearsals are on Monday nights at 7-9pm from February to early December, at Newlands Christian Assembly, 126 Newlands Road, Newlands, Wellington
  
  
• You are welcome to attend any rehearsal
  
  
• There is free parking at the church and car pools operate from several areas
  
  
• Our Musical Director is Ingrid Schoenfeld, who is also a concert pianist. The choir has a bright future under her leadership
  
  
• Our Accompanist, composer Jonathan Berkahn, is skilled on the piano, organ, harpsichord, and accordion
  
  
• Joining is easy – no formal audition required. Come to 3 rehearsals without obligation
  
  
• We’re affordable. Annual membership subscriptions are set at the start of each year. We offer a reduced subscription for singers in the same household. And we have a discounted subscription for full time students
  
  
• To keep these rates low, we have one or two fundraisers a year which are easy to sell to our supporters
  
  
• We hold one or two choral workshops each year which are always well supported
  
  
• Each year we support a good cause by taking a donation / koha at our Christmas concert
  
  
• We also collaborate with other choirs and musical groups
  
  
• The choir sings a wide range of sacred and secular music, and per-forms 3 or 4 concerts each year
  
  
• We know you will make new friends in our supportive greater Wellington community choir 

If you have any questions, please contact:  

• Ingrid Schoenfeld (Musical Director)
  ingrid.s@outlook.co.nz, 027 240 6669  or
  
  
• Philip Garside (Secretary)
  bookspgpl@gmail.com  475 8855

Documentary Video about making the recording of A Hopkins Gloria

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Composer’s note:

A Hopkins Gloria was initially premiered at a concert that included two other Glorias, by Vivaldi and by John Rutter. In the back of my mind were Classical and Baroque “cantata-masses” like Vivaldi’s Gloria, where each fragment of the (Latin) text is spun out into a complete movement. I was tempted in this direction, but decided at length to set the text in English (mostly the version in A New Zealand Prayer Book) – partly because most of the rest of the concert was in Latin. And as soon as I had made that decision, I felt that I couldn’t repeat each clause indefinitely, treating them as tokens to fill out abstract musical designs, but had to regard the text (or at least larger sections of it) as meaningful wholes.

Then I had an idea. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty (“Glory be to God for dappled things…”) came into my head, which I had attempted without success to set at various times over the last twenty-five years. I thought of ‘inhabiting’ this canonical text with other, related texts (“and the birds of the air shall make their homes in its branches…”). It occurred to me that one of Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets, written out of his blackest depression, could make a useful counterpoint to the Agnus Dei sections; then I wondered if the second half of his “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” might work as a way of bringing about a return to the joyful mood of the whole.

So there is a kind of spiritual drama, a dark night of the soul, at the heart of the piece. And it may be worth saying that the emotional dynamic of this section – the attempt to soothe and manage dark imaginings in the early hours of the morning by repetition of the Agnus Dei prayer – is, quite literally, something that has been a regular part of my spiritual life. I do believe, somehow, that joy will have the final word; but suffering and resurrection have to happen first.

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  For more information, please contact:

• Ingrid Schoenfeld (Musical Director)
  ingrid.s@outlook.co.nz, 027 240 6669  or

   

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• Philip Garside (Secretary)
  bookspgpl@gmail.com  475 8855

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