VHK's singing

I have a rule of thumb that if it costs no more than twice as much to buy a score as to hire it, I’ll buy. (This seems to happen increasingly often.) There are advantages to singing from a score you own; you have exclusive control over all markings on it, and can leave in your own personal ones relating to particular difficulties you have. And you won’t have to pay in future to hire it.

But there is some pleasure in using a score that many others have sung from before you. You can for example boggle at some of the peculiar interpretations which your predecessors had to follow, or observe how you are not the first to find a certain passage tricky. At one recent concert our scores of a rarely-performed work were, I estimate, about 60 years old and had accumulated a fair amount of annotation. (As well as using some old-fashioned typography: crotchet rests a mirror image of quaver ones, repeated notes in the accompaniment indicated by slashes, and dots separated from the notes they lengthened. I don’t think I’d ever encountered that last one before.) My score included details of someone’s future travels (to France and New Zealand) on the flyleaf and some instructions (in a different hand) in Welsh!

I apologise in advance that this isn’t really about music, although there is a slight musical angle to it.

On my way to a Lord’s Test match last year I walked along the Regent’s Canal and noticed a handsome church on the other side in Maida Avenue. Later I looked it up and found it is the place where the last regular meetings of the Catholic Apostolic Church are believed to take place. This denomination once had a presence in most English towns of any size (Bath’s church is now the children’s nursery in Guinea Lane) and still has considerable assets, including owning Christ the King in Gordon Square. (The evidence for this can be found in the accounts filed with the Charity Commission.) But its belief in the imminent Second Coming was the source of its near-total demise. According to its rules, priests can no longer be validly ordained, and the last one died nearly 50 years ago.

A glimpse of Maida Ave Catholic Apostolic Church

It was apparently renowned for its music, with its own hymnbook and other liturgical music. Much of this was composed by Edmund Hart Turpin, and how good you thought the music was probably depended on what you thought of him as a composer. A similar situation applied with regard to Edward Wilton Ellis and hymn texts. At this point you realise how lucky the Methodist Church was to have Charles Wesley as its founding hymnographer. But there seems to have been no second generation of Catholic Apostolic Church composers, probably because of the long decline of the denomination through the first part of the 20th century.

So why is there still a congregation? I can think of other denominations at the ‘high’ end of the spectrum which are clinging on with a handful of adherents. The ordination of women has created a number of splinter groups breaking off from the Church of England, which (rather in the manner of Marxist political parties in Britain) have further subdivided themselves into ever smaller factions. There is at least one similar group which has seceded from the Roman Catholic Church over Vatican II. They have few church buildings, although I know of a church in Reading and recall seeing another (which was a former shop) in Canterbury; St Ninians, Whitby has successively belonged to three of these small groups since leaving the Church of England.

Why would anyone choose to be in such a denomination? Especially if you regard its sacraments alone as valid? Why attend a church such as the one in Maida Ave which seems to reject any form of evangelism, even a notice board? I can think of a few reasons:

• conviction that you alone are right and the rest of Christendom, in particular the major denominations, are in error
• an attachment to a particular building, congregation or liturgy
• a chance to have a leading role with an impressive-sounding title
• satisfaction at feeling that you are one of a very exclusive group

I don’t think that this was a particularly vintage year, though there was one obvious highlight: singing in Mahler 8 at the Proms. For public exposure that is hard to beat! If there was a theme to the year, it was that it largely reprised Three Choirs 2016, as I got to sing again four of the six pieces I performed then. I sang in Clifton Cathedral for the first time. I made the acquaintance of Will Todd’s Mass in Blue at a Come and Sing, and at last performed Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music. From the Cathedral repertoire it was Purcell in B flat, Bach’s O Jesu Christ mein Lebens Licht and Weelkes’ Service for Trebles, amongst other pieces, that were new to me. I sang Duruflé’s Requiem with organ in Portugal, and with orchestra in Keynsham. I’ve also spent more time than I’d have liked bobbing about to try to get a view of the conductor.

Most of the performances I went to were local, either in Festivals or by local amateur groups, although I heard an organ recital at the Proms and another in the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona.

And now for some awards:

Performance of the Year. Mahler 8 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in the Royal Albert Hall (see above)

Building of the Year. Winchester Cathedral, where I sang both with the Cathedral Chamber Choir in August and with the Erleigh Cantors in October. I also went to a concert in Prior Park Chapel for the first time. And saw in Barcelona just what can be done with a concert hall when the choir is put at the heart of the design.

Repeated pieces. Nothing really spectacular, but there was Duruflé’s Requiem in its various guises, and at one point I kept encountering Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte.

Mistaken Identity award. Being thought to be French when I sang the Alleluias at a Catalan-language Mass.

Obstructive Fellow Singer Award. The winner of this may well turn out to be the all-time winner. Not content with usurping a place which had been carefully and clearly reserved for a soprano, he took it on himself in rehearsal to relay the conductor’s beat and gestures for the benefit of those of us who couldn’t see that far, and for good measure repeatedly gesticulated upwards if pitch dropped and shushed anyone he thought was singing too loudly. As I couldn’t face an evening next to someone who found fault with my singing every time I opened my mouth – that’s the conductor’s job! – I moved elsewhere for the performance.

Obstructive Fellow Singer Award: runners-up. The trio of sopranos (all from the same choir) at a Come and Sing (not one of Bristol Choral’s!) who decided to monopolise the solos, because of course no one else could possibly attempt any of them. I persisted in singing along with those parts I thought I could do competently – including some passages that their ‘lead’ singer kept getting wrong – so the soprano solo line was always a trio or quartet. It would have been better to divide them between us four (and indeed anyone else who wanted a go), as the altos, tenors and basses managed to do, so that it didn’t turn into a semi-chorus.

What does 2019 hold? I think it might be a year of change in some respects. We are looking forward to having an enhanced organ and new choir stalls in church, but there isn’t a definite timescale for either yet. That is something I’m really looking forward to. There are some pieces new to me turning up in concert, a first visit to Christchurch Priory and the Erleigh Cantors go further north than ever before! And I am going to try and put some more images – at least one a month? – into the blog.