If your musical tastes swing wildly from classical to pop to rock, the Central Otago Regional Choir has just the show for you.
It’s presenting three performances, starting tomorrow in Arrowtown, of Bach, Bacharach and The Beatles.
The choir, numbering almost 40, will sing choral arrangements of music by the ‘‘three Bs’’ and audiences will recognise many of the
songs.
Highlights include Lennon and McCartney’s Here There and Everywhere, And I Lover Her, and Yesterday.
Bacharach classics like I Say a Little Prayer, Alfie and What the World Needs Now are also in the line-up.
Then there are the Bach pieces — they’re also taking on Sleepytime Bach (Swingle Singers style) and Flocks in Pastures Green Abiding.
Queenstown pianist Alison Frude, who’s accompanying the choir, says ‘‘we’re singing it pretty much as Bach wrote it, but as scat singing.
‘‘It’s amazing how often Bach translated into jazz easily, a lot of jazz musicians like his chord progressions.’’
Fellow Queenstowner Peter Doyle’s on drums, along with two ‘‘lovely’’ flautists, Mary Affleck and Jo Robinson on Flocks in Pastures Green Abiding, otherwise known as Sheep May Safely Graze.
Frude says the choir’s always encouraged up-and-comers and this year’s no different, featuring three young guest artists.
They are music student and baritone Kieran Kelly, highly involved in the Dunedin and national choral scene and winner of the under-21 New Zealand Aria Competition last year, 2023 NZ Secondary Schools Symphony Orchestra member Callum Fotherington, who recently successfully auditioned for the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra, and pianist Cameron Monteath, who’ll accompany his contemporaries and
plan Rachmaninov’s arrangement of Kreislers Liebesleid for solo piano.
Frude says, typical of this region, there’s a plethora of musical talent and when it comes together it’s something to behold.
‘‘It’s funny to think that when we first moved here from Wellington 15 years ago, all our friends exclaimed, ‘Why are you moving there? There’s no music there, it’s only skiing and bungy jumping, it’s a cultural desert’.’’
On the face of it, the acts have nothing in common but choir director Richard Madden points out both Lennon and McCartney sang in
church choirs as youngsters, and McCartney had a high regard for Bach’s music.
His song, Blackbird, was influenced by the chord progressions of Bach’s Bourree in E minor for flute, a piece McCartney learned to play at a young age.
Frude: ‘‘You may think Bach was pretty stuffy but he knew how to write a good tune.’’
The Central Otago Regional Choir performs at the Arrowtown Athenaeum Hall tonight, from 7.30pm, at the Lake Wānaka Centre tomorrow, from 7.30pm, and at Alexandra’s Dunstan High School on Sunday from 2.30pm; tickets $30 cash on the door, school students free.
