D.I.D. - Day 2

The next major musical influence of my life came when I hit Grammar School. My music teacher, Neville Bower was an ex concert pianist and composer. Everyone supposedly has one teacher who influenced them greatly and for me it was him. I absolutely worshiped him. And so started my love affair with classical music, but in particular, choral works. Within a year of joining we performed Handel's Messiah. In the subsequent years we also performed Beethoven's Mass in C and Brahm's German Requiem. Not bad going considering our age.

There was, I discovered in later years, something else about out performance of The Messiah that was important. Being an all boys school we had to swell our numbers with some of the girls from two other schools. Although I didn't meet The Magnificent M until we were in our late 40's we had in fact been very close to meeting 35 years earlier.

This picture is a crop from the official picture of our performance. I am below the white arrow, M to the left of the pink arrow as you view it, not 5 foot away. But what makes it even more unlikely that we didn't meet was because the girl to the right of M had been a close childhood friend of mine until we hit secondary school. We didn't see each other then but she became M's best friend. Had I have kept in touch I would almost definitely have met M then. Although it's probably as well I didn't cos we woldn't have been together now, and I suspect we wouldn't actually have got together then.

Anyway, the seeds that were sown for singing then remain with me now. So what to choose. I was very tempted to go with a section of The German Requiem called "Behold, All Flesh Is As The Grass" but it's quite heavy going and lasts 15 minutes so I thought I'd go for something shorter from The Messiah. Not The Hallelujah Chorus which I wish they'd stop playing at every opportunity but the last piece of all from the Oratorio, The Amen Chorus.