@bristolchoral
We gave two performances of the Mass on successive nights, the first in Colston Hall, the second in the Royal Festival Hall. This marked my Royal Festival Hall début!
I have a principle of not evaluating here concerts that I myself took part in, even to say that they went particularly well. However I’ll relax this to say that the London performance had some advantages over the Bristol one. One was the RFH’s recently restored organ, played by Thomas Trotter. (There was an interesting exhibition about the building of this instrument – I particularly enjoyed the appropriately waspish letters from Vaughan Williams). The Philharmonia Orchestra was also larger (8 double basses instead of 6, for example). Although some of Bristol and Gloucester Choral Society didn’t make it to London, the Philharmonia Voices boosted the remainder.
Nevertheless, there were some special moments at Colston Hall. The conductor, Jakub Hrůša, came round afterwards to shake the hand of every choir member he could find. (I contrast this with the time a few years ago when I joined a small choir to sing another tricky 20th-century Central European Mass setting – Kodály’s Missa Brevis – on one rehearsal, and the conductor made no acknowledgement at all of the extra singers individually or collectively.) I was sat near the orchestra as I was in the last concert, and I couldn’t think why I had a draught playing on my back in the normally warm hall – then I realised the curtain screening the organ pipes had been drawn back.
The programme for the rest of the concert (which we were allowed to listen to from our choir seating) differed slightly between the two concerts. Both contained Dvořák’s piano concerto, but even Lukáš Vondráček couldn’t really sell the piece to me. The 19th century piano concerto was usually a display piece, and this was alien to Dvořák’s melodically inventive style. Or perhaps the concerto is just too early, and shares the relative obscurity of the earlier symphonies. In Bristol we heard the overture to the Bartered Bride (I wonder if this is still thought of as a crowd-puller – I’m not sure it is one now that the opera itself is a rarity). In London the concert opened with Suk’s Scherzo Fantastique which I enjoyed rather more.
It is a pity that no national paper seems to have reviewed the London concert. However there are the following online reviews:
Classical Source
Bachtrack (doesn’t name the choirs!)