The most obvious problem to me was intonation. At times it seemed sharp and at other times it was a bit under pitch. Some individual voices sound almost too pointed and needed more space to mellow out the sound. It also sounded as though they could not get over the top note in the melody. The biggest problem with that I think, is the fact that that note lies right around the second break. Since the rest of the phrase could be reached with a middle voice, they didn't want to/didn't know to flip the sound into their head voice. Later on, as the key changed and they moved into a higher part of their voice they flipped into this head voice and their intonation improved.
Their blend across sections was not all there either. When the lower part had the melody you could barely hear them over the sound of the sopranos on the accompanying part.
They have relatively good tone. In some parts you can hear the breathiness Gackle talks about. However, parts of it sound strained to me, as though the girls are reaching up for the note from below, instead of coming at the note from above.
This performance is just mediocre in most respects. The blend wasn't great, their vowels and support seemed lazy, their tone was breathy, etc. I was very unimpressed, which I suppose was the purpose of you picking this video. Mission accomplished. I do think that this is a nice arrangement and could be done very well. Good pick!
ReplyDeleteI feel like this is a very nice arrangement for younger female voices. It provides wonderful opportunities to work on blending and phrasing. I agree the intonation is very fuzzy and I think a lot of that stems from the poor vowels. I think if this choir just got their vowels to be taller and not as spread, the intonation would grow drastically.
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