It was very pleasant to while away a Sunday afternoon singing favourite choruses from Handel's Messiah in excellent company and in the light and airy setting afforded by the imaginatively designed atrium of the hub theatre at Southampton's City College. I cannot  lie, though: the turn-out was rather disappointing. It's a bit of a shame that the publicity for last weekend's Musical Alphabet, Southampton's contribution to the BBC Music Nation weekend, was apparently held up for a couple of weeks, awaiting approval somewhere in the system. (Frustrating for the thoroughly nice and extremely helpful Southampton organisers, I suspect.) Anyway, it came along, eventually, but only a little over a week before the event, and I think the Phil's Come & Sing Messiah choruses (under letter R for Rehearse and Sing) might have been better supported if there'd been a longer run-up. Still, everyone there seemed to enjoy the music-making, and ten of the people who turned up to sing along with the large core of SPC and SU Phil singers were non-members, so we did manage to reach out, albeit not quite as far out as we had envisaged when we were planning our free event.  

David was on fine form, as ever, and the members of the City of Southampton Orchestra who made up our small ensemble did a sterling job under his direction. They were joined by an obliging student of trumpet from Alton College, who stepped in at the very last minute to make up the numbers.   

We worked our way through some of the most famous choruses, including (of course) the Hallelujah chorus, which some of the Choir were still able to sing from memory after all of the preparation we did for our concert performance of Messiah in December last year. We spent a bit of time polishing that one, just in case the film crew turned up, but when they failed to materialise, we just used it to round off our afternoon with an impressive, quality performance!

The tenor section were one man down for minutes at a time, while Charles nipped out to the front to give his posh camera a bit of exercise. He took some really good photos, and I especially like the image pictured here, in which Sandrine and Mich are our star performers!

But thanks...
Many thanks to all of the singers, members and non-members alike; to the players from the City of Southampton Orchestra; to the unnamed (must do something to rectify this!) student from Alton College; to David (our conductor); to Kath Page from Southampton Music Services, who found us the venue and made all of the arrangements for us; to Kevin Appleby of the Turner Sims Concert Hall, whose idea the Southampton Musical Alphabet was; to Jilly and the team at the Turner Sims box office, who handled our ticket "sales". Finally, thanks to City College, for allowing us to use the atrium of the hub and making us all so welcome.