I was sorry to hear of the death of Malcolm Hill for whom I used to sing in the Chandos Singers. In the half-dozen years I was in the choir I sang a huge number of different pieces from outside the standard repertoire. This has on occasion stood me in good stead (I recall being the only one of the 150 or so in Bristol Choral Society who’d previously encountered Lauridsen’s Chansons des Roses) although many others I’ll probably never sing again. Malcolm was big in Poland, so we occasionally got obscure bits of Polish baroque and we never quite saw eye to eye about Saint-Saëns.
He was one of the rare conductors to be quite fair about allocating solos and I’ve never met anyone who was better at conducting cross-rhythms. Pieces which had previously floored me in this respect became as clear as day when I sang them for him. In the end I decided I needed a change because the rehearsal time and place were becoming inconvenient, I wanted to sing some of the many large-scale choral works I’d never done and I was discouraged by the small audiences. (I blame the last largely on the loyalty of Bath’s concert-goers to particular groups and their unwillingness to try others; I’ve heard that in the years since I left the audiences have increased.)