As my bucket list of the works I have never done and want to do is shortened, I find that in the next few weeks I’m revisiting several pieces I have sung before but only once, and that not recently, following on from Elijah last year.
Some years ago I sang a couple of concerts with the Tallis Chamber Choir in the Barbican Hall, one of which included Mozart’s Mass in C minor. It’s a work that never quite seems to make up its mind what the prevailing mood should be – some parts are severely neo-Baroque, others could have been lifted out of one of his operas – and maybe that is why Mozart never finished it, with tenor and (even more) bass soloists left with little to do. How sombre are the minor-key sections meant to be in such a Baroque-influenced piece?
This time round it was the second half of Bristol Choral Society’s spring concert with the Bristol Ensemble in Colston Hall (which has been given a stay of execution before the refit, so we are still performing there next year). We managed to divert an appreciative audience from hearing the New World Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto across the way in St. George’s. There was the added bonus for me that I knew one of the soprano soloists, Charlotte Richardson, from the excursion to Turin with Chorus Angelorum.
The concert opened with Mendelssohn’s Hear my Prayer, a piece which was very out of fashion when I was originally learning the choral repertoire. I knew it existed, but it was only a name and a couple of phrases. It is now OK to perform it again, and this was the first time I’d sung it with the addition colour of an orchestral accompaniment. Julia Hwang joined the choir again, to perform the same composer’s Violin Concerto.
Earlier in the week I’d gone to the end of term concert at Kingswood School – a mixture of giving ensembles a chance to perform and showing off the talents of some musicians who are soon to leave. The fashion for projecting moving backdrops behind performers has not abated yet, and I was quite mesmerised by the petal-like shapes behind the performers.