At some point I should post about the selection of songs I occasionally sing snatches of while gardening because of their appropriateness. I selected one – used as I pull up bindweed – for my contribution to the second recital in our autumn series, given by a selection of performers from the church who volunteered their services. I had to take care to unlearn some incorrectly memorised bits from my outdoor performances.
Misalliance is one of the less well-known Flanders and Swann collaborations, and while it might seem very different from Swann’s Requiem for the Living, it shares the moral that the world would be a better place if we all stopped worrying about our differences and got on together. Of course one cannot replicate (and shouldn’t try to) the comic timing of the original performers, and I borrowed some ideas from a King’s Singers arrangement.
We were given a free hand in what we chose to perform and this caused a number of us to gravitate to the lighter end of the repertoire, though we pulled out two pieces from the choir’s normal repertory at the end.