Gareth Malone: I want to teach the shul to sing

It is 6.30pm on a Thursday evening and an ebullient Gareth Malone is telling 140 members of Finchley Reform Synagogue to touch their toes. Then, he tells them to stand up and move closer to the person next to them.

“Those atoms can’t repel!” he announces loudly and cheerfully. “Now you’ve found your buddy, stick to them like glue! We can really get some juice and emotion out of this section, but that will only come when you’re responding to each other. And right now, I feel we’re at entry-level passionate.”

Britain’s best-known choirmaster is rehearsing a piece of music congregants will sing at the shul’s Rosh Hashanah morning service, and then again on Simchat Torah. Since he burst onto our screens in 2006, when he was invited to make The Choir series for BBC2, Mr Malone has created choirs from inner-city schoolboys, military wives and young offenders.

But this is the first time he has instructed singers from a bimah.

“It’s also the first time I have ever sung to a roomful of Jewish people in Hebrew — and corrected them on their pronunciation,” he tells me, grinning, during rehearsal break.

He’s not a Hebrew speaker as such, but Mr Malone is a long-standing friend of the synagogue’s full-time cantor Zoe Jacobs and knows the Finchley Reform community well.

And before they met, his two closest friends in Bournemouth, where he grew up, were Jewish.

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Malone

“One person says beigel, and another says bagel, right? You get pronunciation variations and questions in any choir, and my job is to sort them out.”

When it came to this choir, it was also his job to write its music. “Rabbi Miriam Berger asked me if I would compose a piece with Zoe for this year’s High Holy Days.

In June, we were all set to go into a room and write it when Zoe’s partner got Covid. So, we actually composed the music over Zoom. We took two liturgical texts and wrote two melodies we were confident would work well together.”

This musical congregation, the first Reform synagogue in Britain to employ a cantor, already has a regular choir of 45 people. But Mr Malone’s telly factor meant they were joined by a further 100 would-be choristers for the project. “I know him! It’ll be safe, I’ll go along,” he says, smiling.

“There’s been quite a lot of excitement,” says Cantor Jacobs. “People who’ve never before sung in a choir have said they went home after the first rehearsal feeling wired, and unable to sleep. Our kids and young people are particularly excited. They feel they’re at heart of something big.”

Isaac Reuben, 17, concurs. “I can’t get over his insights into Hebrew pronunciation and linguistics. It’s amazing that as a non-Jew he’s been able to work with us and compose something so Jewish,” he says.

“It’s my last year of school so I’m pretty busy, particularly today when I submitted my final piece of A-level drama coursework. But I really wanted to be here this evening. Singing with Gareth is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And it’s such a testament to his skill, that this has all come together so quickly.”

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Malone is rehearsal with the congregants