Five gold rings makes me think of music, let the bells ring out for Christmas.

This year I’ve learnt to sing five choral works from scratch to sing with five choirs in two countries:

Symphony No 9 (Choral) Beethoven

St Mark Passion JS Bach

A Sea Symphony Vaughan Williams

Cantata no 3 “Gabriel” OZNO

Te Deum Bruckner

For someone with sightsinging abilities as poor as mine, all of this was an incredible challenge and an awful lot of hard work. I think the two most challenging were the Vaughan Williams and the OZNO for different reasons.

As I became more familiar with the different layers of writing in Sea Symphony, I started to appreciate it and like it. Sadly, I still can’t say the same for Gabriel, the charm of which almost completely escaped me. Every time we even approached a melody, it retreated swiftly into oblivion. I am obviously a complete Philistine.

Learning a 12 tone piece, interval by interval was an interesting challenge, one I’m pretty sure I haven’t quite conquered despite the considerable ear tuning I tried hard to do. In the end I recorded my part on the piano and learnt it by heart and I’m certain that was not the required approach. Tant pis, however. I’ll just have to try and somehow radically improve my sightsinging.

I started listening to Sea Symphony in July but whenever I listened I couldn’t really make sense of it, partly because my score differed from the recording I’d downloaded. I kept getting lost, giving up and, to my shame, falling asleep and waking up in the fourth movement.

Once we’d started learning the OZNO with the HK Bach Choir, the imperative of learning this totally alien piece took over, and left me with little time to get to grips with Sea Symphony before I arrived at home in Beckenham at the end of October. Three weeks remained in which I tried to concentrate hard on that, and I found that singing it in choir rehearsals with the Green St Green and Camden choirs and the orchestra (as well as the BYMT Adults) was more helpful than any amount of listening I’d done previously.

I think I made a reasonable fist of it in the end, but I probably would have been better at the second concert, which I could not attend as I had to rush back here for my Hong Kong rehearsals.

In the end I caught a nasty virus and only just regained enough breath to sing at the second of the two Cecilian Singers concerts at the chapel in Stanley. In fact I don’t think I fully recovered until after the HKBC concert, but I still managed (just) the pp high bits and the top Cs at the end of the Bruckner, and anyone in the sparse audience will have witnessed my delight at that achievement.

I should add that learning the Beethoven alone to fly in and perform in Bromley in May was also a challenge, not because the tune was difficult but because practising those sustained high notes at the required volume, with help from Oscar the canine soprano was almost impossible in the town house with thin walls that we rent here. What everyone heard of my practice was a thin squeak with no resonance, yet Ms Jenevieve somehow picked up the tune and was humming it with some accomplishment while preparing supper by the end of April, so I can’t have been that far off. That piece taught me once and for all not to be frightened of notes above the stave which should be well within my 1st Soprano range and are, really, it’s just that they look scary on the score.

More familiar, and therefore more pleasurable were the revisiting of the Mozart Requiem and Zadok, also the come-and-sing Creation in London and the Cecilans’ Christmas Carols but I shall forever curse John Rutter and his tear-jerking arrangements at inconvenient moments.

What a year it’s been for my singing! Such a lot to learn and at times I thought I’d bitten off far too much but I did the work and acquitted myself reasonably well in the end. I’ve made no headway on individual solo work for an eventual LTCL exam but maybe I’ll start that in the coming year. We’ll see.