Vaughan Williams’ greatest hits – and Britten

Posted on May 20, 2022 by vhk10

The concert programme for the final Gloucester Choral Society concert of the season marked the Vaughan Williams anniversary with a selection including some of his best-known shorter works. We sang in all of them apart from The Lark Ascending, played by Hannah Roper.

The Mass in G minor is a work I’ve sung parts of many times. But I’d never sung the Creed for an audience, only in a Come and Sing, so there was a first performance for me in this concert.  I’m always glad to have a chance to do this piece and particularly enjoy the parallel fifths at the end of the Gloria.

I sang the Serenade to Music a few years ago with Bristol Choral Society. That time we dispensed with soloists and everyone sang everything, but in this performance we had a solo quartet, and organ (or rather toaster – Gloucester’s organ has just been taken out of action for repairs) accompaniment.

Otherwise: I revisited the Five Mystical Songs after a few months, with James Geidt as soloist this time. This performance and the one last autumn confirmed my view that no two people conduct the end of Let all the World the same way.

We sang the Te Deum in G, rather faster than I’ve done it in previous performances, and the concert concluded with O Clap Your Hands.

We had a very complimentary review: Seen and Heard International.

A week later I was back in action with the Bath Abbey Chamber Choir, singing a Sunday evensong.  As (I think) the only soprano familiar with Britten’s Festal Te Deum in E, I was volunteered for the solo part, which I’d never done before.  Our canticles were Wood in F for double choir.

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a workshop on The Eighth

Posted on May 12, 2022 by vhk10

Four years on from Berlioz, the South Cotswold Big Sing Group is reconvening, this time to perform Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Sadly, the advance workshop in Gloucester was all I’m going to get of this, as I’m not free to sing in the performance. But I came along anyway, having missed singing with large groups.

I think I’ve alternated between Choir 1 and Choir 2 when I’ve sung this, and it was Choir 1’s turn. In the morning we rehearsed on our own, and then were joined by the other lot, and at some point all the notes got sung.

Afterwards I dashed out to my local bookshop to get my hands on a copy of The Eighth by Stephen Johnson. Our conductor has made dire predictions that health and safety will make performing the work impossible in future, but I hope that won’t be the case.

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Requiem (3): a new one

Posted on April 14, 2022 by vhk10

The third Requiem of the spring was a premiere performance of a work by Richard Gabe, a member of the choir at church and connected by marriage to a late friend of mine. Like the Rutter it mixed some words from the Requiem Mass with other liturgical and biblical texts; each movement was written in memory of a friend or family member of the composer. The choir was assembled for the occasion on the day (with prior rehearsal and music circulated beforehand), but quickly gelled into a unified sound, and we had a large audience to perform to for the mid-afternoon concert.

It was a busy weekend for me as there were two Palm Sunday services at Bath Abbey. Highlights included movements from Palestrina’s Missa Aeterna Christi Munera, which I don’t think I’ve sung since I was a student, two settings of Christus factus est (Bruckner and the less familiar Anerio) and Daniel Purcell’s canticles in E minor, as sung by me in Portsmouth Cathedral last year. I’m told there’s been a live donkey at the Palm Sunday Eucharist there in past years, but we didn’t have one this time.

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Requiem (2): Fauré

Posted on March 30, 2022 by vhk10

A week on: another Requiem and another setting of Psalm 23. This was Gloucester Choral Society’s double-bill of Fauré and Stanford in Gloucester Cathedral.

I would have liked to have illustrated this post with another in the sequence of windows from the cloister, showing the Ascension. But there isn’t one! The sequence drawn from the Gospels/Acts jumps from the women at the tomb, to Paul on the road to Damascus. There are plain windows in between, as if they had intended to fill the gap, or some mishap befell the windows with Ascension, Pentecost etc.

This would have been to illustrate Caelos ascendit hodie, the central one of the Three Motets, which we performed in a sequence with some transposition to smooth awkward jumps of tonality between them. The text is an obscure one – an internet search just turned up references to Stanford – doubtless chosen for Trinity College because of the line Laudetur Sancta Trinitas.

Other Stanford pieces were that war-horse, the Te Deum in B flat, the aforementioned Psalm 23 setting and ending with the double-choir Magnificat in B flat. When I worked in Cambridge I would sometimes go to evensong at King’s at the end of the week, and because Friday was unaccompanied, as often as not this would be the setting. I’d sit there staring at the stained glass wondering just how much more of the piece there was! Our interpretation was rather livelier, certainly more so than any other I’ve given of this work (I may have been the only soprano at least who had performed it before).

The Fauré was accompanied by the organ, the last I’ll hear of it for a while as it’s being taken out of action for major work. I’ll get to sing it again in the autumn with Bristol Choral Society.

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Requiem (1): Rutter

Posted on March 26, 2022 by vhk10

Somehow I found myself singing three concerts with a Requiem in, within four weeks. The first was the return of CanZona (I sang in their last concert in December 2019) to perform Stainer’s Crucifixion and Rutter’s Requiem.

I sang the Crucifixion as a student and don’t think I’ve performed the whole piece since then! Not that I have a particular aversion to it, but I haven’t taken advantage of chances to do it and it had faded from the memory a bit. It used to be sung every year on Good Friday at another church in Bath, but that tradition appears to have died out. Of course it never goes away entirely, thanks to God so loved the world and a couple of hymn tunes (about which I hope to write more in another post).

I was assumed to know John Rutter’s Requiem, but in fact I’m unfamiliar with his larger works for choir and orchestra. It includes other biblical and liturgical texts, and draws on a mix of styles, including the French Requiem tradition and spirituals. The setting of Psalm 23 was composed some years earlier, and I’d already encountered it as he recycled it for Psalmfest too. We had lost a couple of altos to Covid, so I filled in alto leads as and when I could.

Our concert made headlines in the Bath Chronicle for non-musical reasons which I won’t go into here.

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the sounding of thy bowels

Posted on March 24, 2022 by vhk10

The phrase in the title used sometimes to be replaced by other words in performances of O Lord look down from heaven by Battishill, but not when I heard Merton College choir sing it at evensong in Bath Abbey earlier this month (nor in a recent evensong broadcast). It was, however, omitted from the text printed in the service sheet.

Merton joined forces with the girls and men of Bath Abbey choir for this service. There were some 60 singers in the combined group, which suited Battishill’s and Stanford in B flat rather more than Tomkins respones and Tallis. The sound was certainly powerful! There was a good-sized congregation and my only quibble was that we didn’t get a hymn to sing, unlike the weekday evensong which inaugurated the Abbey’s Chamber Choir last autumn.

Merton does something unique, I think, in Oxbridge and offers entrance choral scholarships to students at other Colleges. (I suspect Cambridge, with its competitive choral rivalry between Colleges, would not tolerate this.) So the choir, which admittedly always did have a significant proportion of non-Mertonians, is increasingly a University choir which happens to be based at Merton.

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no raffle at Onegin

Posted on March 20, 2022 by vhk10

Almost the last musical event I attended in before lockdown was a Bath Opera performance, and two years on it was time for another, Eugene Onegin.

I’ve been to three performances of this – one a few years ago at the ROH I wrote about here and the first was Glyndebourne Touring Opera in Oxford in December 2002, so a few months before I started this blog. (The main thing I remember about that particular performance was the odd contortions adopted during the dance at the beginning of Act 3, in an otherwise realistic production. Every so often the dancers would freeze into some improbable pose, highlighted by the lighting, for a few seconds.)

Bath Opera adopted a more naturalistic approach throughout, with a small dancing troupe among the carefully directed chorus. There’s a cast list here. As at the ROH, I found myself wanting to hear more of Lensky (here sung by Daniel Gray Bell). The (mostly) young principals were all convincing and vocally secure; the small orchestra settled as the evening progressed (this was the first night).

I don’t know whether it was something about me, but the people on either side of me all left during the first act. Perhaps they didn’t care for the work being sung in English, or maybe they’d just had enough of things Russian that day (February 24th); both reasons might have applied especially to the Polish couple on my right.

I missed one standard aspect of Bath Opera productions: the raffle of bottles and the like, donated by the cast. I’ve rarely left a performance empty-handed. Probably a Covid casualty, although I think it could have been managed in a responsibly distanced way.

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m=approx 365(1-exp(-N/365))+1

Posted on March 2, 2022 by vhk10

It was my birthday earlier this week and in the evening I went to choir. Every few weeks on average this particular choir sings ‘Happy Birthday’ to one of its members, and I wondered whether this happened for any choir member who went to a rehearsal on their birthday, or just for those who are on the committee or help out in some other way.

The formula above, supplied by a mathematician friend, tells you how many different birthdays you might expect in a group of N people. For 100 people it’s about 88. Another mathematician friend ran a numerical simulation which agreed with this. (I know it was that time of year, but let’s ignore February 29th for this calculation.)

As there are about 100 people in the room at a typical choir practice (such as yesterday’s), and as far as I know no sets of twins in the choir, the formula above gives a chance of just under 1 in 4 that it is the birthday of at least one of them. Of course if it is in fact your birthday, you are more likely to give choir a miss that week and spend the evening with your family or down the pub. That suggests that ‘Happy Birthday’ might get sung about one week in six, which seems about right – and implies that all choir members are entitled to be serenaded with it on the appropriate day.

What actually happened was that we were invited to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ – to an alto who shares my birthday. I quickly piped up that it was mine too, so both our names were included. Although as a relative newcomer most people either didn’t know mine at all (it wasn’t I think announced) or thought they did, but in fact didn’t.

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no Tenebrae at the Bachfest

Posted on February 23, 2022 by vhk10

We had tickets to hear Tenebrae at the Bath Bachfest, but the concert was cancelled as it proved impossible for the choir to reach Bath on the day when Storm Eunice struck. I was not the only person in Bath who would have gladly put up a singer overnight on the previous day if that had meant the concert could go ahead. To add insult to injury, Radio 3 broadcast that evening part of one of the pieces we would have heard.

However I didn’t miss the Bachfest altogether as I went to hear Mahan Esfahani and Mihala Petri perform on the Saturday morning. They’d visited four years ago but this time were in the Assembly Rooms not the Guildhall. I think they may have played at least one of the same pieces as then too, perhaps the J S Bach sonata which replaced one by CPE Bach they hadn’t had time to rehearse in situ (Eunice again).

You wouldn’t have guessed that Mahan Esfahani objects to Handel from the account of the sonata HWV 367a. Each performer had a solo turn: two virtuoso harpsichord sonatas by Scarlatti and a transcription (I’d guess Petri’s own) for recorder of Bach’s first Cello Suite. This survived the translation well, although there is the difficulty that unlike the cellist, the recorder player has to breathe (or rather, that their breathing interrupts the music). The encore was more sober than last time.

Sunday was a busy day for singing with a Eucharist at the Abbey (anthems by Willan and Tallis) and an evensong at Christ Church which tested my sight-singing abilities with David Halls’ Responses, the Totney Mag and Nunc after Howells (OK I had done these once before) and an anthem by Stuart Beer, for whom I used to sing at Manchester but never his own music.

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Francis Jackson and the missing anthems

Posted on February 6, 2022 by vhk10

I really thought that Francis Jackson might be immortal, but sadly he wasn’t. I have sung a fair amount of his music and have been struck by his liking for fourths.

His Communion in G was a staple at my Cambridge College, but when I came to sing it with the Erleigh Cantors I think I was the only person who’d sung it before. His Evening Canticles in G were another Cambridge staple, rather more generally known. I’ve sung his Responses, and – just once each – his Benedicite and the Missa Matris Dei.

So this is the unusual thing – are there any anthems by him in the repertoire? It is rather odd that I’ve only done canticles, responses and Communion/Mass settings.

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