On September 10th I took part in a ‘come and sing’ Verdi Requiem at Bristol Cathedral with the New Bristol Sinfonia and soloists, presented as a 9/11 memorial concert. I passed up a chance to sing this work earlier in the year and realised it was a very long time since I’d sung it. As I transferred a couple of recordings to CD over the summer, I regretted this and so seized the opportunity to bridge this gap.
The ‘come and sing’ approach might not be thought to work too well for this particular piece, but I think some of the Bristol choral societies must have done it recently. While some of my neighbours were new to the work and others (like me) had not performed it for a while, the level of familiarity with it seemed to be very high. I think it’s also true that once you know the Verdi Requiem, it’s with you for life.
I go back quite a way with the conductor, Mark Lee, as he was organ scholar of my Cambridge college. He led a briskly efficient rehearsal in the afternoon (there had been an optional one earlier in the week). Although I thought of our conductor as not one for taking risks, there was no prohibition on the alternative chorus soprano line near the end of the work, so several of us sopranos made a top C pact and did it. I hadn’t sung it before, though I can’t now remember whether it was because I didn’t have the confidence or because the conductor explicitly told us not to.
We had a sizeable audience (unlike the performance I declined to join earlier in the year). The concert had started at 7.30 and had a short pause in the middle though no interval. The audience was expected to wait a moment at the end before applauding, but what actually happened was I think unscripted. As the final chord died away, the Cathedral clock struck the hour and then chimed nine. It would detract from the efforts of the performers to say this was the defining moment of the evening, but there couldn’t have been a more appropriate ending.