So the great day finally came round, and I got to sing the Missa Solemnis with Gloucester Choral Society and the Bristol Ensemble in Gloucester Cathedral.
I wrote earlier of the particular difficulties of performing this piece. It wasn’t Beethoven’s fault that pitch has risen since his day, but I am left with the impression that LvB believed sopranos would explode if they came into prolonged contact with the stave. There are some gratuitously difficult lines, such as the bar where the soprano soloist goes from a high A to a high B via a brief detour to a note an octave lower. With familiarity the notes in the chorus part came more readily, though it may be beyond my powers to make them sound easy. And perhaps this work is not meant to sound easy. I gather that Prof. Nicholas Marston (still known to me as Nick, from the days when he returned to his undergraduate College choir to sing alongside me) made this point in his talk about the work.
In fact I found that the pacing actually worked. On the only page where my voice came unstuck, we’d been asked to reinforce an alto lead, so we were singing one more bar than Beethoven had assigned to us. I think that this is only possible with a careful choice of tempi, by enjoying the gentler passages when they come round, consciously releasing tension before the really hard bits, and of course by not giving all in rehearsal. The final proof that this approach worked was that I was able to sing a chunk of the verse section in Stainer’s I saw the Lord in church the following morning.
The Missa Solemnis is not quite the rarity it once was; in fact there was a performance in Cardiff the same night as this one. But it has not been performed in Bath since 1982, so if I hadn’t made a move this time I might not have had another opportunity for a while. I hope one does come round before too long though, because having learnt the Mass thoroughly I would love to sing it again.
Two sublime, radical works in the space of eight days: it gets no better than this.
[January 2017: I’ve now listened to a CD of the concert, which gives an idea of how it sounded if you were in front of rather than in the midst of the performers. It is very tempting to try and pick out one’s own contribution when doing this, but although some individual chorus sopranos are audible, I’m not among them. The recording does confirm my impressions of the performance in various ways.]