Tuesday brought a change of orchestra with the Royal Philharmonic replacing the Philharmonia. And the most unfamiliar of the music we had to sing.
Holst’s memorial stone in Chichester Cathedral
Holst’s Ode to Death was only a name to me previously. As long as you can count to 5 and to 7, it is pretty straightforward to sing. There is a very characteristic central section in what I call Holst’s ‘hobnailed boot’ mode, with crotchet octaves clunking their way through the lower registers. I’d happily sing it again, but am not in a great hurry to do so.
Francis Pott’s A Song on the End of the World had its premiere at the Three Choirs Festival in 1999, but for reasons beyond the control of the performers that did not go well and it was felt that it deserved another outing. (We had just one survivor from the previous performance in the choir this year.)
I’d been intrigued by Pott’s music after hearing his The Souls of the Righteous on evensong broadcasts. A song was a piece that sorted out the modernists in the choir – I’d like to think there were at least some others there. Tonality comes and goes (you’ll look in vain for a key signature). The words, carefully selected from liturgical texts, mediæval lyrics and a variety of modern poetry, are almost uniformly dark, although I will go out on a limb here and say that I did not find them as depressing as those of A Time for All Seasons a few years ago. However having a high tolerance for dissonance in itself doesn’t make it much easier to learn. While I don’t have difficulty pitching augmented 4ths/diminished fifths (singing Friede auf Erden as a student taught me how to do that) I discovered I wasn’t all that good at falling sixths; something to work on. This piece took out a lot of our rehearsal time, but I think we nailed it on the night – at least, the composer looked pleased afterwards.
Reviews: