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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a Epiphany carol service

Posted on February 5, 2022 by vhk10

This was a new development at Bath Abbey and the Chamber Choir was singing. One novelty for me The Magi’s Dream by James Whitbourn, better known to me as a producer of Choral Evensong broadcasts, with words by Robert Tear, better known to me as a singer. (I have sung a Mass setting by Whitbourn.) Notable for its gradually increasing tempi and rather abrupt ending, it can be heard in a recording by King’s College Choir.

Our introit from the West end was Omnes de Saba by Handl, which I did years ago with the Chantry Singers. Apart from that we sang some usual suspects by Lauridsen, Cornelius and Howells.
January also contained a sad event of a kind I’ve mostly been spared, the funeral of a member of our church choir. The rest of the month was quiet, not least because I had a nasty cough which got in the way of any singing.

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a review of 2021

Posted on January 2, 2022 by vhk10

For obvious reasons most of my musical activity in 2021 was concentrated in the latter part of the year, and in the autumn I became almost ridiculously active (at one point I had 4 rehearsals on successive days in 4 different towns).
A brief summary of some of this:

  • 2 Cathedral visits with visiting choirs (Portsmouth for a week in August, and a Bristol weekend in October)
  • 1 concert with Bristol Choral Society (Bristol Cathedral again)
  • 3 performances with Gloucester Choral Society (one outdoors in the cloister garth, two concerts in the Cathedral)
  • 3 carol services, 2 funerals, a wedding, and eucharists/evensongs in Christ Church and Bath Abbey
  • recording more anthems at home with Christ Church choir for streaming online

Autumn also saw the return of a full Mozartfest programme and we’d also gone to some Bath Festival concerts in May; otherwise I went to few performances given by others, although they included one by a visiting choir which I’d really rather forget. No opera or music-related trips to London or Cardiff.

In September I joined the newly formed Bath Abbey Chamber Choir, and have sung several services with them. There are some exciting plans here for 2022.

A less welcome autumn development was losing a number of people I’d sung with or for on many occasions: Joanna, Jane, Sharon and Malcolm (and add to them Doreen who died earlier in the year). All of them long-term supporters of music in their respective situations.

Since the pandemic began, I have also reflected on the experience of reaching ’round number’ anniversaries with various choirs. In one case this has caused apparent resentment from at least one person who has not been in the choir as long as I (although there is nothing I can do to change the date I became part of the choir); in another I seem almost as far away from belonging as when I joined. The result is that I feel pushed to the margins and left to sort the problem out on my own. These considerations in turn influence where I choose to do more of my singing, and partly account for the prominence of the Abbey chamber choir (where we are all newcomers to the choir, if not to the Abbey) and Gloucester Choral Society (where I’m always going to be something of an outsider because of living at a distance, so I feel no need to strive for acceptance).

So one aim for 2022 is to find a sympathetic ear for some of what I’ve described in the previous paragraph. Maybe I have over-reacted – I just don’t know. On a more positive note I have the likely prospect of one, possibly two, overseas choir tours, Cathedral visits, singing full-length concerts with orchestra and attending concerts and opera again.

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Bath Abbey in December

Posted on December 23, 2021 by vhk10

To complete the picture of what I was up to in December, I sang more services with the Bath Abbey Chamber Choir. Almost all the music the choir has sung this term has been already known to me, but an evensong introduced something new: Alan Rawsthorne’s canticles in D (largely an exercise in singing thirds). We paired it with that Advent favourite, Naylor’s Vox Dicentis. A week earlier on Advent Sunday we’d done part of Ives’ Missa Brevis (I turned out to be the only one in the choir that day who’d sung this before).

On Advent 4 we demonstrated that we do sing early music by singing Palestrina’s Missa Brevis and Parsons’ Ave Maria. The New Year brings an Epiphany carol service, a series of Eucharists, a Passiontide concert and a visiting-choir evensong at Southwark Cathedral.

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three carol services and a wedding

Posted on December 22, 2021 by vhk10

After the Christmas Oratorio at the beginning of December I didn’t have any more Christmas concerts, but I had more carol services than usual: Advent, a special one on behalf of the local hospital, and the church Christmas one (which I’ve missed singing in the last few years). We stuck to familiar (to us) pieces for Advent and I am gradually working my way through the O antiphons: this time it was O Rex gentium. The Christmas carol service included two pieces (and composers) new to me: Ian Assersohn’s mediæval-inspired Make we joy now in this fest and Samuel Pegg’s The wise men (a setting of G K Chesterton) as well as a setting of In the Bleak Midwinter by a member of the choir.

In the middle of this we had a wedding of a choir member; I have sung at few such occasions since I was a student. The choice of hymns and anthems appropriately exploited the nuptial imagery associated with Advent.

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my first performance of the Christmas Oratorio

Posted on December 21, 2021 by vhk10

Somehow I’d managed to miss doing more than odd movements of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Apart from the first chorus in isolation in a New Cambridge Singers December concert many years ago, and the chorale which turns up in Carols for Choirs, it was new to me, if not to most others in Gloucester Choral Society which performs it every three years. I’m not even very familiar with it from broadcasts.

nativity stained glass

The Nativity – cloister window, Gloucester Cathedral

Our rehearsal conditions were not the easiest, as for several rehearsals we were divided into single voice parts and generally rehearsed without accompaniment. This ensured that everyone could meet every week for an hour in the small numbers enforced by spacing. (While the Cathedral nave has plenty of physical space, the echo makes life very difficult if there are too many singers.) Sight-singing the trickier parts of the Christmas Oratorio under these conditions – I had missed the first rehearsal which was a sing-through with the whole choir present – with no other voices or accompaniment to hide behind, was a real challenge, but perhaps that was part of the point. When it came to the performance many in the choir opted out so we were a significantly smaller group than usual, and we used more baroque phrasing than in the last performance I gave of Bach with this choir. Our orchestra was the Corelli Orchestra, who brought their panoply of oboes back with them.

Despite being largely arranged from other, often secular works, it is a charming piece with a variety of jubilant and more reflective moods, and the Lutheran emphasis on personal devotion giving it a more inward-looking feeling than much Christmas music; this may explain the subdued (especially from a soprano point of view) ending. For the record, we sang parts 1, 2, 3 and 6 which I believe is the standard selection although the previous Gloucester performance replaced 2 and 3 with 4 and 5.

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RIP Malcolm

Posted on December 14, 2021 by vhk10

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.)

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