St. John Passion
Credit: The Hallé
As we expand our range of great choral courses, we turn our attention to JS Bach and the St. John Passion, a favourite of choral societies all over the world.
We shall learn this piece with separate voice part rehearsals and new recordings of the complete work including our voice part only to help our learning. We are then invited to record our voice and submit this to the choir.
All voices will then be combined in the studio and broadcast back to the choir at one of our online concerts. We can then share this with family and friends. And for The Self-Isolation Choir’s course, we are delighted to welcome our course director, Ellie Slorach.
Ellie Slorach
Ellie is a conductor based in the North West. She graduated from the Royal Northern College of Music with a masters degree with distinction in conducting in 2018 after studying music at the University of Manchester.
Ellie is the musical director of the Hallé Youth Orchestra, Radius Opera, Chester Festival Chorus and Stafford Choral Society and the Associate Conductor of Manchester Chamber Choir and Huddersfield Choral Society. In 2015 she founded Kantos Chamber Choir. With Kantos, Ellie has been the director and chorus master for numerous recordings and performances including with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the BBC Philharmonic on labels including Decca Classics. Ellie regularly directs for the BBC Radio 4 Daily Service and Sunday Worship broadcasts and directed Kantos in Rome and Assisi for special edition broadcasts.
In the 2019-20 season, Ellie made her debut with the Hallé Orchestra. She also toured the major UK theatres with Matthew Bourne’s new production of Romeo and Juliet as the Young Associate conductor. In the 2020-21 season she will make her debut with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir for a world première performance and will conduct Northern Ballet’s production of The Great Gatsby.
Visit her website here.
As you can see, Ellie is one of the UK’s bright young conductors and we are delighted to have her as our course director as we learn and sing St John Passion. She has arranged for the organ at Westminster Cathedral to be played by James Orford for us. Her singing ensemble, The Kantos Chamber Choir, will perform the whole work and act as our learning companion. As is usual with The Self-Isolation Choir, she will take rehearsals in each voice part so that she can concentrate on your own part exclusively for the whole rehearsal.
The rehearsals are pre-recorded videos, so you can start the course whenever you wish. She will in addition hold three monthly LIVE concerts where we shall sing through the whole work together. If you miss one, don’t worry as there will be another concert the following month. The course will cost £19.99 to include a free online score and will be sung in German. Ellie will arrange for an online tuition video to assist with the language.
The course is available now
When possible, it is planned that members of this course will be offered the chance to sing St. John Passion “out of isolation” together at the place where it received its first ever performance in 1724 - the Church of St. Nicholas in Leipzig.
About St. John Passion
From Wikipedia
The Passio secundum Joannem or St John Passion is a Passion or oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach, the older of the surviving Passions by Bach. It was written during Bach's first year as director of church music in Leipzig and was first performed on April 7, 1724, at Good Friday Vespers at the St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig.
The structure of the work falls in two halves, intended to flank a sermon. The anonymous libretto draws on existing works and is compiled from recitatives and choruses narrating the Passion of Christ as told in the Gospel of John, ariosos and arias reflecting on the action, and chorales using hymn tunes and texts familiar to a congregation of Bach's contemporaries.
Compared with the St Matthew Passion, the St John Passion has been described as more extravagant, with an expressive immediacy. The work is most often heard today in the 1739–1749 version (never performed during Bach's lifetime). Bach first performed it in 1724 and revised it in 1725, 1732, and 1749, adding several numbers.
