two lots of carols for the Christmas market

Posted on December 2, 2019 by vhk10

It’s a few years since I sang carols at Bath’s Christmas market. This year I had two shots, back to back! Firstly I did some moonlighting by running through a few standard carols with the combined forces of some of Grenville Jones’ choirs, under the arch in Abbey Yard. Then I moved round the corner to the West front of the Abbey for an hour’s stint with Bath Cantata Group, in which we sang from Carols for Choirs 1 in order, picking out carols selected by our conductor. Not necessarily just the popular ones – I don’t think I’ve sung the Zither Carol since I was a student. We had an appreciative audience, though it was something of a graveyard slot as the market was winding down. It’s good to be able to contribute to live music-making at the market, particularly when I won’t be singing in the choir at any Christmas carol services.

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Brahms with 4 hands

Posted on November 30, 2019 by vhk10

I have sung Brahms’ German Requiem within the lifetime of this blog, but it was not long after I started it! Instead I’ve twice attended a series of rehearsals with Bristol Choral Society for performances I couldn’t take part in. So I really felt I was owed a chance to sing this in concert, and it came when I rejoined Bath Cantata Group for a performance in St Stephen’s Lansdown conducted by Neil Moore.

This was the version accompanied by piano duet, which Bristol Choral Society intended to do a couple of years ago, but didn’t because Colston Hall became available and we hired an orchestra. (Some years ago I was also supposed to be involved in a Bath Camerata Good Friday performance of this version, but wasn’t invited because of some admin hiccup. By the time this was realised, I’d missed too many rehearsals and I got a profuse apology.) Obviously it lacks the full weight, colour and volume of the orchestral version but it works well with a smaller choir and some details stand out more. It is also easier in some places to feel the pulse with a more percussive accompaniment.

Our soprano soloist was Julia O’Connor, familiar to anyone who regularly goes to Bath Opera productions; the baritone was Timothy Dickinson. The piano duet was played by Jacquelyn Bevan and Will Ashworth (the choir’s regular accompanist). I am full of admiration for the amount of concentration required to do it justice – greater than even the amount of stamina required for the choral parts (I regard this as the most demanding of the major choral works in this respect). As if that wasn’t enough, they opened the concert with Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor, a piece I used to play back in the day.

We had a sizeable audience. I’ve only sung rarely before in St Stephen’s, the last time being with A Handful of Singers (as they then were). It is a sympathetic acoustic although I missed a light whose bulb had gone out between midweek rehearsal and concert.

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accompanying The Women of Ryazan

Posted on November 28, 2019 by vhk10

The silver screen came back to Christ Church for another silent film accompanied on the organ, as part of the Bath Film Festival. This time David Bednall played for the remarkable 1927 Russian film by Olga Preobrazhenskaya, The Women of Ryazan. His improvising style was rather different to David Briggs’, being more reliant on creating a general mood and only rarely quoting other pieces of music.

There may be more such events in future, and after two dark films it might be interesting to hear improvisation to, say, a historical drama or a comedy.

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rehearsing but not performing

Posted on November 25, 2019 by vhk10

Fortunately I rarely have to pull out of performances because of illness, but a number of times in the last few years I’ve gone to rehearsals for a concert I wasn’t singing in. Twice the work concerned was the German Requiem and part of the reason for rehearsing was to build up familiarity with a piece I’d eventually get to perform again. (And I now have: post to follow).

Apart from this, another reason to go to such rehearsals is to get the benefit of the conductor’s expertise. And to get to know a new piece that you haven’t encountered before. This was the case this autumn as I went to rehearsals for Bristol Choral Society’s next concert, which consisted largely of pieces that we will record in the New Year. Two that we aren’t recording were a pair by Eric Whitacre: Cloudburst and Water Night, settings of overlapping texts by Octavio Paz. His early work Cloudburst was especially intriguing as it was more experimental and I haven’t really been stretched much in this way since I was in the Chandos Singers. It would spoil the surprise for those who don’t know it, if I tried to describe the ways in which the sonic range of this piece is extended beyond standard choral singing. At any rate, I felt a bit sorry that the later Whitacre pieces I’ve sung have been rather more conventional.

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railway bitonality

Posted on November 20, 2019 by vhk10

My recent visit to Japan (the previous one was just before I started this blog) didn’t have a great deal of musical content, but I was able to observe again one feature of travel there: the use of distinctive melodies often associated with a particular route or station and played over the public address system. Many of them sound as if they could have been written by John Rutter. There are if anything now more of them than before. Indeed Nippori (a suburban station in Tokyo near where we were staying) appeared to have one in the station building and a different one out on the platform, with aurally chaotic results if both were played at the same time.

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the animals get it right

Posted on November 6, 2019 by vhk10

I once heard this as a comment on The Cunning Little Vixen, which I went to see at the Wales Millennium Centre. (For some reason Welsh National Opera thinks that Bristol audiences can’t handle Janáček and don’t bring their productions of his operas to the Hippodrome).

We have at least Vixen (and Fox), Badger and Jay visiting our back garden. Our local Sharpears steals dog toys from the neigbours and brings them under a large tree there for her cubs to play with. She (or Fox) has also somehow worked out how to swing the ‘lockable’ handle on the Council-issued food waste container up and over to get at the contents, and is now thwarted by a double layer of containers we call the ‘fox box’.

The opera’s cast, led by Aoife Miskelly in the title role, were mostly young up-and-coming singers, and were required to show considerable athleticism. I’m not very familiar with this score but couldn’t fault the singing and playing (Tomáš Hanus conducted). This production has been around since 1980 and has the Pountney trademark umbrellas, here impersonating flowers. Badger’s/Sharpears’ den must now remind quite a lot of us of the Teletubby house.

Unlike previous stagings of this production, this one was sung in Czech, thereby preserving the composer’s skilful word-setting. The libretto has been tweaked a bit by Jiri Zahrádka and I would be interested to know how extensive this is and why it was done. Perhaps some politically incorrect humour has gone, or maybe an attempt to make it more topical? Nevertheless, it steers the fine line between allowing the animals enough human emotions and behaviour for us to empathise with them, while not disregarding the gulf between the human and animal worlds, with the latter’s brief lives and continual struggle for survival. (A convenient piece of artistic licence is that sometimes the humans and animals understand one another’s speech and sometimes not. How does the Forester come to know Sharpears’ name?)

WNO is following this with The Makropoulos Case next season and I don’t intend to miss that even if it means another trip to Cardiff.

Some reviews:

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the Great Service

Posted on October 20, 2019 by vhk10

Long-term readers of this blog will know that Byrd’s Great Service of evening canticles has long been on my wishlist of church music that I’d never sung. In the usual way, after years of waiting, and just as I was thinking of organising a performance myself, I got two independent invitations to sing it this month. The one I was able to accept came from the Laetare Singers who included it in a workshop conducted by Adrian Partington at St Peter’s, Henleaze. I signed up like a shot when I was given a flyer for this.

I had a slight head start with the Byrd as I have heard it many times (including a very duff performance at one of England’s premier church music establishments). It requires a long attention span and much concentration, especially as we were all invited to sing the verse sections.

An arrangement from Harvest Festival

An arrangement from Harvest Festival at St Peter’s Henleaze

I hadn’t sung Howells’ Take Him Earth for Cherishing since I was a student, and it was another piece I was very keen to sing. I’d never done the second soprano part, which has some decidedly non-contractual notes in. (Adrian Partington, a former pupil of Howells, explained why this was: HH composed at the piano). I equipped myself with a score beforehand to learn them and the 2nd altos behind me also came in handy.

Later we were introduced to early Hispanic liturgical music. I’d assumed this was the Iberian version of the Sarum Rite et al, but it is earlier and tantalisingly undecipherable. Rather the opposite of ancient Greek music, where we can read the notation but don’t have many actual scores. One thing that can be worked out is that it went in for extremely long melismas, reminding me a little of the meditative chants of some Eastern religious traditions. We sang three pieces by Alison Willis (who came along to talk about the project out of which they arose): psalm settings inspired by what we know about this murky area of church music.

We had light accompaniment in the performances at the end of the day, which was a relief to me as I’d have got very thrown in some of the high Howells entries if we’d slipped too far. (Pitch drop might however have suited a fellow singer who was clearly experiencing discomfort with her hearing aid if anyone near her sang above an F! There are surely few worse places for such a person than the middle of the front row of a soprano section.)

This handsome church – built more recently than its exterior would suggest – made a very good venue. They have a seriously skilled flower arranger there.

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Mahler meets Mr Profile

Posted on October 8, 2019 by vhk10

The recent work on our church organ was shown off in an inaugural recital by David Briggs, who also performed on it after a major rebuild a few years ago.

The first part consisted of the well-known Toccata and fugue in D minor attributed to JS Bach, then Vierne’s Carillon de Westminster and a transcription of Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

After the interval we watched the 1920 silent film ‘Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde’ as it would originally have been screened, with organ accompaniment. The star John Barrymore was definitely more Hyde than Jekyll, to judge by accounts of his life. Known as ‘Mr Profile’, he was often shown in this way on screen.

The improvisation opened by quoting Mahler 6, and I heard quotations by Wagner, Grieg, Elgar, Mozart and others among the purely improvised material. By the end, the promise made to us in advance had been fulfilled – one was not conscious of the organ music as an addition to the original film. A bit like becoming less aware of the puppetry during a performance of War Horse.

If you ever have the chance to hear David Briggs improvise accompaniment to a silent film (and wherever you are in the world he is quite likely to perform near you soon), take it. It’s an art form in itself. Meanwhile, David Bednall will be doing something similar in Christ Church during the Bath Film Festival.

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my Prom for 2019

Posted on September 28, 2019 by vhk10

I try to get to at least one Promenade concert every year, and this year picked a Sunday evening concert with a predominantly East European programme. This was the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov. I chose it partly because I thought it was unlikely to pull the crowds, and it was indeed sparsely attended, rather unfairly so. I was in the arena, and it was a relief that there were more opportunities to take a break from standing than last year.

The concert began with the first performance of Nuages by Linda Catlin Smith. The title (which I only learned after I’d heard the piece) didn’t surprise me much, as it drifted gently along for a quarter of an hour or so without really doing anything in particular. Janáček’s short tone-poem The Fiddler’s Child was unknown to me but seemed to be well played.

The first part ended with Szymanowski’s Love Songs of Hafiz, sung by Georgia Jarman with some gusto. If you like the orchestral version of the Seven Early Songs, you’ll probably enjoy these as the sound-world and melodic style are similar.

The second half consisted of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony. This had a rousing performance – I particularly appreciated the contributions of the timpanist and the brass – but I can see why this one doesn’t get performed so often. Each movement has a folk-tune at its heart, but these melodies just reappear in different orchestrations rather than being developed. I didn’t stay to find out whether there were any encores.

Reviews:

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a belated return to Truro

Posted on September 20, 2019 by vhk10

Truro was one of the first Cathedrals that I performed in, but that was a one-off: a concert I sang on tour with the Exon Singers. I’d never sung a service there until I returned with the Cathedral Chamber Choir to sing in part of the choir’s annual Cathedral week.

I feel quite at home in the building as the Clayton and Bell stained glass is from the same workshop as that in my home church. The music list for the latter part of the week was predominantly 20th century, with two 21st-century pieces that were new to me by Matthew Martin – his Responses and Jubilate; also those quirky stalwarts, Kelly in C and Rubbra in A flat, and the classic Let all mortal flesh by Bairstow and Let all the world by Vaughan Williams. From the 19th century we had Brahms’ Geistliches Lied.

As before on our August week we got the acrostic hymn for St. Bartholomew. Just what is ‘Rapt in their apostolate’ supposed to mean? Presumably ‘glad to be an apostle’. I wonder whether JAL Riley got the idea from seeing the end of the Tantum Ergo, whose last two lines begin EW, and took it from there?

Our Mass setting was Mozart’s Missa Brevis K192, in which I sang some of the solo part in the Gloria. Our conductor auditions for solos; I wasn’t sure about this when he started doing it, but have been won over. It has the following advantages: prospective soloists get a chance to show what they can do; if you want to rule yourself out of consideration for some reason, you don’t put yourself forward; and the conductor gets to hear what people actually sound like singing the solo lines or together in a quartet, rather than having to imagine it.

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