Will Todd's Mass in Blue
Soprano: Joanna Forbes L'Estrange*
Piano: Will Todd
Will Todd Jazz Ensemble, featuring:
Double Bass: Gareth Huw Davies
Drums: Jim Fleeman
Saxophone: Paul Jones
Sound Engineer: James Welch
*Our original soloist, Lisa Swayne, was indisposed, and we were extremely grateful to Joanna Forbes L'Estrange for taking her place at very short notice and wowing both choir and audience with her brilliant performance!
Chilcott: A Little Jazz Mass
Jazz set - Will Todd ensemble, featuring:
A H Brown arr. Will Todd: Just As I Am (Saffron Walden)
Miles Davies: All Blues
Oscar Peterson: Hymn To Freedom
Johnny Mandel: The Shadow Of Your Smile
Trad. arr. Will Todd: Give Me Joy in my Heart
INTERVAL
Will Todd: Mass in Blue
We were delighted to see a full house for a concert featuring two exciting and increasingly popular jazz settings of the traditional Mass, both ideally suited to The Maltings.
Bob Chilcott's A Little Jazz Mass for choir with piano accompaniment reflects the composer's lifelong love of jazz and is one of his most celebrated works. Since its appearance in 2004 it has been performed all around the world and has also featured as part of the liturgy, including in St Paul's Cathedral in London.
Will Todd's Mass in Blue (2003) is a favourite with choral societies and their audiences alike. It is described as "an upbeat jazz setting of the Latin mass text for soprano soloist and four-part chorus". The composer and the other members of the Will Todd Ensemble (piano, double bass, saxophone, drums) accompanied the choir and soprano soloist in what was a zingy performance!
In addition to these two choral works, the concert also featured a jazz set by the Will Todd Ensemble.
We were very grateful to the Humphrey Richardson Taylor Concert Trust for their generous support of this event.
See below three videos of Lisa Swayne, Will Todd, and Joanna Forbes L'Estrange taling about the Mass in Blue. As Lisa says: "There are some absoloutely banging tunes in it!". Will's advice to the choir is: "Don't be on the back foot!" And Jo predicts that "You'll hear the words of the Mass in a completely new and joyful way!"
Reviews
"Jazzy triumph for Waverley Singers as celebrated composer Will Todd wows the Farnham Maltings audience"
This review of the concert by John Broom appeared in the Farnham Herald online on 4th April 2024, and (with a slightly different headline) in the Farnham, Alton, and Haslemere Herald print editions on 11 April 2024.
On Sunday, 24th March, we were treated to an extraordinarily exciting evening of music, with The Farnham Maltings packed out for the Waverley Singers’ concert featuring the Will Todd Jazz Ensemble.
The concert marked 15 years of Richard Pearce’s tenure as Conductor of the Waverley Singers and he had put together a masterly programme, harnessing the wonderful talents of Will Todd, both as composer and as performer, his terrific Ensemble, the marvellous Soprano Joanna Forbes L’Estrange and, of course, the Waverley Singers and their conductor himself.
It started with Chilcott’s Little Jazz Mass, which was well performed and was a worthy appetiser, but one that was completely blown away by what followed, starting with a quite dazzling set of Jazz pieces, two of them Hymns, no less, as Will and Co showed us round the Jazz world.
But surely, they couldn’t have turned a 4/4 piece into a 5/4 piece - just like that, without any rehearsal, including solos from each of these virtuoso Jazzmen, into a star number which had us all foot-tapping embarrassingly up and down the hall? Seems they did. Will says he started out on the piano playing just by ear…and it shows. He’s also come a long way since then!
But if the Jazz ensemble blew the Chilcott away, the Mass in Blue blew away everything else. Will Todd’s masterpiece isn’t just the words of the Mass thrown into the Blues genre: it’s a piece of enormous depth, range, and feeling. Is there any other Mass which puts such solemnity into Crucifixus Etiam Pro Nobis, then leaps so joyfully into Et Resurrexit? Or, which has the rhythmic chanted pleading of Agnus Dei over and over, and ends with the triumphant shout of Credo?
All the performers rose to this great occasion. Of the Ensemble, enough said. Joanna Forbes L’Estrange’s Soprano soared and swooped over and through the choir, giving us true Blues, in a way which Bessie Smith herself would have loved (from an Octave or so lower!). How does she hold on to such purity of sound with all that emotive force?
And then there was the choir. The Waverleys sang with tremendous precision, commitment, and energy, with a wonderfully rich sound. Richard Pearce had succeeded in extending their comfort zone into a completely new genre, and they sang as if they had been doing it all their lives.
This Concert was a triumph!
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