I made time at lunchtime to go and hear the University Chamber Choir and the Madrigal Ensemble give a lunchtime concert in the concert hall at the Victoria Rooms. The Chamber Choir is rather large for a group of that name – about 60 strong – and the Madrigal Ensemble is a select 16; one bass sang in both. The Victoria Rooms concert hall has had the promised refit; it is now equipped for note-taking (and conference income) but the antique notice pointing the way out to the telephones is still there!
The music was a mixture of periods, nationalities and liturgical seasons (apart from two madrigals it was all sacred). Mostly familiar to me, though I hadn’t heard Philip Stopford’s lovely setting of the Coventry Carol, and pieces by Josquin and Bertholusius were also unfamiliar. The sound of both groups was strong and confident; my only criticism being some slightly dodgy tuning (or was it wrong notes?) in some passages which moved by step. (The sort of thing that gets worked on heavily in Bristol Choral Society rehearsals.) But as I’ve said before, these choirs avoid the usual problem of student choirs, that of being top-heavy.
The programme was almost all unaccompanied, and I wish it had all been so. The instrument in the Victoria Rooms is a toaster (all right, a digitising organ) of some antiquity. I am not a fan of toasters, but I concede that they have come on quite a lot in the last 20 years or so, and I’d have been quite happy with a decent one in this concert. (On a related topic, I ask again: what did happen to the organ which must once have lived in St. George’s Bristol? Couldn’t it have been retained when the building was made into a concert hall?)
However, the sound produced by the Victoria Rooms concert hall ‘organ’ is so hideous that it almost made me feel physically ill. The bass throbbed, making my eardrums rattle and setting my teeth on edge, and the treble was distorted and hollow. The first piece that was wrecked by this was a personal favourite: Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen from the German Requiem, which made it even worse. I just about managed to endure the sound to the end of Blest Pair of Sirens, which followed. Fortunately in this last the choir sounded loud enough to drown out the organ a bit. I’ve only sung the Parry a couple of times, as it’s gone out of favour both in church and on the concert platform – it seems to go by so fast when you sing it that I hadn’t realised how long it is.