Last Saturday I joined the Chandos Singers again for a programme of French (composer or language) secular music (nice to have a concert in December that isn’t taken over by Christmas). I’d never sung any of it before.
I say ‘secular’ despite several pieces having sacred texts. Probably the most sincerely religious setting in the evening was the two chunks of Poulenc’s Stabat Mater that he set before the rest. A mediæval motet about Balaam suddently turned into a skit about speakers of English. Moulinié’s motet Congratulamini mihi omnes can be adapted for any saint’s day – provided the saint’s name doesn’t contain too many syllables – but the exclamations O amor! O voluptas! in the middle suggested that the author of the text had other things on his mind. As for Saint-Saëns’ Le Déluge, the sins of antedeluvian humanity and their gruesome punishment were dwelt on at such length that I wonder whether the author really hoped that contemporary Parisians might meet the same fate.
I had a part in a section for quartet (though six of us performed it) in Le Déluge. It’s the sort of piece that it’s impossible not to ham up a bit, and is one of those compositions whose premiere was disrupted by members of the audience objecting to the amount of dissonance it contained. Hasn’t really changed my attitude to Saint-Saëns though.
We also did among other things Lauridsen’s Chansons des Roses, in which my main difficulty was that the soprano line often lay very low. The fourth setting is so similar in its harmonic progressions to his O Magnum Mysterium that I’m not sure that with a bit of transposition the two pieces couldn’t happily be performed simultaneously.