observing the Weelkes anniversary

Posted on February 10, 2023 by vhk10

I foresee a lot of Tudor repertoire this year, with anniversaries both of Byrd and of Weelkes. I observed the latter by singing his ‘First Service’ canticles at Bath Abbey (doing a number of the first treble verse parts) with the Abbey Chamber Choir. I don’t think I’d sung these before, so the familiarity I felt must probably have come from listening to them. There are plenty more Weelkes canticle settings for me to learn this anniversary year; I believe he wrote nine settings in all and the only others I’ve done are his Short Service, the Service ‘for trebles’ and the Magnificat from the 5-voice setting, so that’s five and a half to go.

The rest of the service included music by Bairstow and Parry with the Ayleward Responses. Byrd’s turn will come early in Lent.

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the rise of the carol service

Posted on January 30, 2023 by vhk10

Time was when a carol service meant Christmas carols. (It has a sister in the ‘carol concert’, a format I’ve never really enjoyed because it feels wrong to pay for something that is often very similar to a service.) Advent carol services are now well established, and my church has had both of these in December for many years.

This year I marked four stages in the nativity story with a carol service; as well as Advent, Christmas and Epiphany (see the previous post; this was the odd one out as it was in Bath Abbey) we had one for Candlemas. This last had a Nunc Dimittis and several anthems from our repertoire (including Mathias’ Lift up your heads – another way of repurposing it as the Ascensiontide season is so short).

The format is fairly standard: appropriate music for choir interspersed with hymns, prayers and readings, either biblical or otherwise suited to the season. (Bath Abbey’s Epiphany service last year was rather more experimental but this format clearly lay behind it.)

At least the turn of phrase ‘Help us, for whom Lent is near’ was more appropriate this year. It felt very odd last year when we anticipated Candlemas on the last Sunday in January, and Lent was at that point not until the month after next.

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At last! Tribus Miraculis!

Posted on January 15, 2023 by vhk10

This piece by Marenzio had been on my wishlist for a while, after I’d heard it on numerous broadcasts at Epiphany time. It came round in the Epiphany Carol service at Bath Abbey this year. More florid in style than contemporary pieces by English composers. I thought I’d not sung anything else by him (this seems to be the only sacred piece by him that is much performed), but on checking my records found a couple of other anthems. A good way to start the year, anyway.

Other pieces included Dove’s Seek him that maketh the seven stars (sadly we didn’t get the full effect of this as the Abbey has a toaster temporarily installed), Howells’ Here is the little door, Leighton’s setting of the Coventry Carol, Tchaikovsky’s The Crown of Roses, and a reprise of Elgar’s The Spirit of the Lord which we sang at last year’s ordination. They were interspersed with prayers, Bible readings and hymns (with, unusually for the Abbey, a couple of bloopers where choir and congregation were singing significantly different words from one another!)

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Review of the year: 2022

Posted on December 31, 2022 by vhk10

This was naturally enough a great improvement on the two previous years. My musical life (like my non-musical one) contained many events postponed from 2020 and 2021, and so became very busy.

I’ve only done half a dozen overseas choir tours in my life, but two of them were this year. First, the Gloucester Choral Society excursion to the Veneto, including singing in San Marco, the Frari church in Venice, the basilica of St Antony in Padua and Asola Cathedral. In the autumn came a trip to Hannover with Bristol Choral Society to mark the anniversary of Bristol’s twinning with the city.

Actually the music-related highlight may not have been either of these, but being part of spontaneous singing of the National Anthem at the Oval cricket ground, if only because I can’t imagine being part of anything quite like it again.

Large-scale concerts returned (though not the Bristol Beacon, for which we must wait till December 2023) and the works I performed at them included Fauré’s Requiem (twice), Rutter’s Requiem, Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs (twice), the long-awaited Symphony of Psalms by Stravinsky, Vivaldi’s Gloria and Messiah.

The Bath Abbey Chamber Choir is finding its feet and I have learnt new repertoire (including O Hearken Thou from my wishlist) and did the solo in Britten’s Te Deum in E. I didn’t do much singing with visiting choirs at Cathedrals, although I did go to Lichfield and Gloucester with the Erleigh Cantors. I reacquainted myself with some pieces I had not sung for many years, such as Howells’ Responses, Stainer’s Crucifixion and, at different times, all of Handel’s Coronation Anthems.

Concert-going was now freely possible again, and this included a Prom, Bath Opera, a trip to the Barbican and to hear Welsh National Opera in Cardiff.

2023 promises excitement both in performing and in hearing others do so. I’ll write it up here in due course (along with finishing off writing about 2022).

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Advent/Christmas 2022 (2): four carol services

Posted on December 30, 2022 by vhk10

Three I sang in and one where I was in the congregation.

One new piece for me in the church Advent carol service (held as usual on the second Sunday in Advent): Nova! Nova! by Bob Chilcott, very catchy but you need your wits about you, especially when the rhythms get subtly altered between verses. Later in the month was the Christmas carol service with two more new items: The Owl by Toby Young (where an apparent need to economise on paper led to a lot of to-ing and fro-ing through the copy to navigate the piece) and In the Stillness by Sally Beamish. That wasn’t the last carol service I sang in the choir for though, as we hosted one for the local hospital the following day.

Back in St David’s for the first time since 2019 we went to the 9 Lessons and Carols at the Cathedral, as well as Midnight Mass and the service on Christmas morning. We were rather taken by the Welsh carol beginning Roedd yn y wlad honno sung at the 9 Lessons. There has been a change of Director of Music since we last came, but standards held up well and the tradition of extravagant organ improvisation continues.

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completing the set of Coronation Anthems

Posted on December 15, 2022 by vhk10

The following weekend I had another concert, Bristol Choral Society’s Christmas concert in Bristol Cathedral. A chance to complete the set of Coronation Anthems by Handel, as we did all except The King shall Rejoice, which I sang in May this year. This was something of a memory test for me, as I had not sung two of them since I was a student, in a rather short-lived choir conducted by John Butt. This still put me at an advantage over most in the choir who had not done them at all!

They require a lot of stamina and energy, not just to project the overall bright celebratory mood, but also in the more reflective passages, such as one bar in My heart is inditing which is at a much greater level of difficulty than anything else in the anthems. (Sopranos who’ve sung the anthems will know which bar I’m talking about.)

If they need some singers next May, we know the anthems now and improved on the original performance (if the notes made by the then Archbishop of Canterbury are to be believed: ‘the Anthem in Confusion: All irregular in the Music’).

The other half of the programme was Vivaldi’s Gloria, the subject of our Come and Sing earlier in the autumn. I learn from the programme that it wasn’t published till the 1920s – you tend to assume that such a popular piece now has been known about since at least the mid-nineteenth century when baroque music began to be performed again.

Another concert where it was good to be back with an orchestra (the British Sinfonietta). We had a sizeable audience who were generous with their applause.

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an unheated Messiah

Posted on December 10, 2022 by vhk10

I try to space out performances of Messiah – helped by the pandemic I’d managed to go four years since the last one – and in fact I’d never performed it in Gloucester Cathedral. I rejoined Gloucester Choral Society (having missed their main autumn concert) for their performance, rather expecting the interpretation to be the same as when I’d sung it for the same conductor in Bristol Cathedral. Not the same at all, as there were all sorts of adjustments to take account of the different acoustic and maybe also the slightly smaller choir, or just second thoughts about how it should be done.

A replacement for a broken part in the heating system in the Cathedral was held up in the post, and so we were unheated; rather than sitting in a row on stage, our soloists came and went from a warmer room in the cloisters, just appearing in order to sing. Our orchestra (the Corelli Orchestra) improvised various ways of covering themselves in additional layers. (An appeal: I have a black supima cotton polo-neck top, bought from Lands End I think for a Bath Camerata performance some years ago, which is Gloucesterproof. However, it’s fraying at the cuffs with wear, and although I can conceal this under a jacket or by rolling the cuffs in a certain way, it would be good to get another similar garment. Lands End don’t seem to do plain polos anymore, so any leads on another supplier would be welcome.)

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Advent/Christmas (1): Spanish music on Advent Sunday

Posted on December 2, 2022 by vhk10

December is often not as busy a month for me as it is for many choral singers, but this year there were two concerts and several carol services. Advent Sunday (not December, I know) was a busy day, beginning at Bath Abbey where I sang much of Palestrina’s Missa Brevis and Guerrero’s Canite Tuba, as well as the Advent Prose.

In the evening there was the first of the carol services I sang in this season: at St Michael’s Within, sung by CanZona. Unlike last time I sang there, we were at the East end in the sanctuary. The music included some less standard pieces such as Javier Busto’s Ave Maria and Softly by Will Todd.

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Mozartfest 2022 and Nosferatu

Posted on November 25, 2022 by vhk10

The Bath Mozartfest presented a full programme for its 2022 edition, largely in the Assembly Rooms (the Guildhall did not feature). All Covid restrictions had apparently been lifted, apart from visible hand sanitizer and the absence of a coat rack. Another absence was Mozartkugels on sale in the interval, but I’m told that they had not been proving lucrative for the Festival.

We went to a concert at my favourite time of Saturday morning, to hear the Pavel Haas Quartet. After Haydn’s Op 76 no. 1, came Prokofiev’s second quartet in F, unknown to us but clearly meriting a closer acquaintance. The concert concluded with Schubert’s D887 in G, centered on its slow movement punctuated with interjections. The quartet sat in an unusual arrangement: first violin, second violin, cello, viola. A characteristic of their interpretations was that the melody was always clearly projected.

Another family member went to hear Jennifer Pike and her father Jeremy in recital playing music for violin and piano by Mozart (K380), Clara Schumann (Romance, Op 22 no. 1) and Grieg (Op 8). The undemonstrative interpretation suited these pieces, none of which could really be counted as major works, well.

Meanwhile, David Bednall returned to church to accompany Nosferatu, a silent film which I’m told established many conventions in its genre. (As my main point of reference for horror films is Young Frankenstein, I can’t really comment except that I recognised some of them!) As usual the accompaniment came to blend with the film until you were not aware of it being created separately from it. These silent film screenings with live accompaniment are developing quite a following locally.

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a Remembrance concert

Posted on November 18, 2022 by vhk10

The Chamber Choir was involved in Bath Abbey’s concert for Remembrance for the first time. This concert was logistically quite an undertaking as the various pieces used different combinations of performers. Indeed Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs (the third recent performance of these for me) used different choral groups in different songs; we were required in the first and last. The other pieces sung by the Chamber Choir included another outing for Lennox Berkeley’s The Lord is my Shepherd, Ireland’s Greater Love and John Rutter’s Ukrainian Prayer from earlier this year.

This concert aimed high and there was plenty more sung by the Abbey boys/girls/men, including Howells’ Requiem and his Take him, Earth, for cherishing.

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