The nation’s recording engineers in the field of choral music must have been very busy around now, as several different ensembles I know of have all been recording. Bristol Choral Society (with Music Makers of London, Bristol Youth Choir and various professional soloists both vocal and instrumental) were in St George’s Bristol for three days being recorded by Delphian. We had colour-coded plans for where we should stand – important as the forces involved were different on each day and some pieces were more ‘antiphonal’ than others. Standing in one place for long periods of time felt as tiring as walking around, and I ended with blisters on my feet. (The third day was easier, as I was on the back row, with a metal bar behind me which acted as a kind of misericord.) Add to that the concentration at the level of a concert performance, but for hours at a time, and it’s a very demanding process.
I hadn’t been in St George’s since the extension was recently built – I still wonder where the organ would have been in the original church. as it still appears to have the original gallery seating on the full length of three sides. As it’s not a recording studio we had to beware of extraneous noise: Great George (the University bell), floorboards, planes, sirens and a backstage toilet!
All three pieces were premiere recordings. The final piece we recorded, The Big Picture by Judith Weir, sets poetry on a colour theme, ending with the Christina Rosetti multicoloured poem which neatly sidesteps the lack of a rhyme for ‘orange’*. Other colours include Green with a poem attributed to Henry VIII (as the sentiments of eternal fidelity don’t really fit him, I am suspicious of this attribution. And if King Henry decided to claim your words as his own work, you probably didn’t argue.) We were fortunate in having the composer present on the day we recorded this. Cecilia McDowall’s A Time for all Seasons juxtaposes Ecclesiastes 3 with poetry by Kevin Scott Holland. Bob Chilcott’s Songs and Cries of London Town sets texts about London both familiar and less well-known. It’s supplied some material for my gardening songbook as I weed out runaway herbs (a post for another time).
Usually there’s no way to find out what a performance described here sounded like, except by asking someone who was there, but with this the results will appear in the shape of a CD in due course. Listen out for an exciting and varied array of percussion!
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*Apart from the Blorenge, a mountain in south-east Wales. When I heard Marty Wilde’s song ‘Abergavenny’, I regretted the missed opportunity to exploit this fact.
