an authentic harmonium

Posted on May 18, 2018 by vhk10

I joined local choir CanZona (the median capital letter differentiates it from the ensemble Canzona) for a performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle in aid of our church organ fund.

Years ago the Cambridge Chamber Group was going to do this piece, but with external soloists, contrary to this choir’s usual practice. The conductor, Ian Moore, said that Rossini’s apparent wish that soloists come from the choir was just his little joke and he didn’t really mean it. This time we followed Rossini’s direction and used our own soloists.

Last time I sang this piece I made a highly embarrassing mistake, so I was relieved that there was no equivalent mishap this time. The chorus parts are not physically demanding, but you have to be on the ball with split-second timing, as you’d expect from a composer of comic opera.

I have remarked before on the curious imbalances in the piece and I’m puzzled by, for example, the ritornello that is just a few bars, played once only, and the downbeat ending of the Agnus Dei(the major key of the final section being a bit like an extended tierce de Picardie and not really changing the mood all that much). Second time round, I notice that the that opening intervals of the Et vitam venturi fugue are as in Beethoven’s setting of the same text.

There appears to be a minor industry in hiring ‘authentic’ French harmoniums specifically for this piece. Ours came from London, and I know of another which went from Yorkshire to a performance in Cardiff a couple of weeks earlier. I can’t remember what we did in Bristol Cathedal – perhaps a chamber organ subsituted.

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captured by the Muse in the stratosphere

Posted on May 6, 2018 by vhk10

My attention was drawn to this telecast of a performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music by a friend who is the brother of the tenor soloist. I enjoyed the performance, with brisk tempi and a choir who were not numerous but seemed well on top of the music (one particular soprano lead near the end of the Creed, which is usually shaky, came through clearly). My main reservation was that I sometimes felt the addition of the organ to be intrusive; maybe it seemed less so if you were in the hall.

There was however additional interest in seeing how the filming compared to, say, that of a choral Prom from the Albert Hall. We got many more shots of the chorus, or at least of some of them, as what you saw most of was the alto section. Perhaps the sopranos, ranged in front of them, weren’t so telegenic as they contorted their faces to reach the high notes or betrayed panic at the approach of some of the harder passages? At any rate one can, for example, compare concert dress with that worn by British choirs.

Google Translate doesn’t cope well with Hungarian, and I end with some quotations from its version of the page: ‘it can be compared to a symphony with a sibling… Beethoven was captured by the muse in the stratosphere, so he made a great effort on the fly to make it more monumental in liturgical contexts. ….Missa Beethoven is perhaps the most difficult piece to perform, so it is so numerous that the Óbuda Danubia Orchestra is now performing with the National Singing Car and Opera’s four private singers. … High and loud music, at the same time, is the strongest one, which brings meditatively into one and moves deeply to every person. … When the chorus and Gloria sound out of nowhere, except for Bach, all the religious music is obscured. There is no man to run the cold on his back.’

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memory test

Posted on April 28, 2018 by vhk10

It is my boast (and this is a bit of a boast) that I almost never totally forget a piece of music that I’ve performed, however long the interval until I perform it again. Unfortunately I usually don’t remember it perfectly either, and on re-encountering the piece I have to work out how much re-learning I’m going to have to do.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been re-introduced to some long-lost friends. I have good recall of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, which keen readers may remember I sang in 2014. Preparing an all-Bach programme (and preparing is all I’ll do, since I’m not free to sing in the concert), I find I don’t know Bach’s Magnificat as well as I thought I did; I sang the other soprano line last time I did it.

On the other hand, I remember Komm, Jesu, Komm and Singet dem Herrn, both works full of notes, almost perfectly, although I have not performed either of them within the lifetime of this blog. Komm is my favourite Bach motet but I have bittersweet experiences of it, as the last time I sang it was the final concert of the Brandon Hill Singers, where we barely had enough singers to cover the parts as so many had left. (I missed singing in another performance around then; it was the main work in a concert from which I felt I was unfairly excluded.) My previous performance of Singet was before I came to Bath.

So which factors help a piece stay in the memory?

  • I’m more likely to remember a good work than a bad one
  • having really learnt a piece thoroughly at some point; the first time I sang the Bach motets we were not stood with those singing the same part, so we really had to learn our line thoroughly
  • having first encountered the piece when young and with a more retentive memory
  • on the other hand, if I learnt a piece only a few years ago, I expect I’ll remember it
  • having performed it more than once, even if the last performance was a long time ago
  • the more notes there are, the more you have to remember

The most severe tests are the works I have done only once before, when I was a student. When I encountered them again recently, I didn’t remember Elijah or the St John Passion well, but there is a lot in both, and first time round they were, erm, rather hastily rehearsed. Similarly Mozart’s C minor Mass. If I want a real test, I ought to try having a second shot at Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi, at least, those parts that are not taken from his Requiem.

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taking Duruflé to Lisbon

Posted on April 24, 2018 by vhk10

I have not been on many foreign choir tours – on average, it’s been about once every four years – but two of the few that I’ve done involved Duruflé’s Requiem. Perhaps it’s because it is a substantial work for choir and organ, or at least with an organ arrangement by the composer. Bristol Choral Society took it to Lisbon for two performances. (The other tour I sang it on was with the New Cambridge Singers, who went to the Anglican church in Versailles.) We paired it with that old Corpus standard, Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine, and our soprano soloist Gwendolen Martin sang two other French items.

Bristol Choral Society did several foreign tours in the period immediately before I joined. This was the first one since then which was organised by the choir with repertoire of our choosing. Choir tours come in two kinds – the ones that are rapidly oversubscribed so that choir members have to be turned away, and the ones where extra singers get drafted in to make up the numbers. We had a few imports, though not so many in my section.

We had difficulties finding a rehearsal venue, but the eventual solution was a rather atmospheric one: the Anglican church located in the Protestant cemetery by the Jardim de Estrela (a very multinational cemetery, amongst other things holding Commonwealth war graves). It’s the sort of corner that I wouldn’t think of visiting otherwise, especially as it is locked a lot of the time.

Our first performance was in the church of Nossa Senhora da Cabo, Linda-a-Velha, a modern church with an impressive acoustic. Our second was in the Cathedral, a largely Romanesque building which was sufficiently solidly built that it mostly withstood the great earthquake. Both performances had appreciative audiences of 100+.

However well the plans are laid in advance, foreign tours always carry the risk of some logistical problems. (I’ve had stories of organists turning up to practice at French churches and finding themselves locked out, Notre Dame de Paris disclaimed all knowledge of our choir when we turned up to sing Sunday Mass there, and when my College choir went to Hungary what happened often bore little resemblance to what was on our itinerary.) Nothing like that happened in this case, and both venues were suitable for our forces. Portuguese organs on this showing go in for en chamade pipes.

Am I up for more foreign choir tours? It will depend where they go. I wanted to revisit Lisbon, having been there briefly a couple of years ago. I declined an invitation to Germany last year, partly because I wasn’t very interested in the destination and also didn’t have much confidence in the travel arrangements (rightly as it turned out). And when part of the point of a tour is to get to know other choir members better, it’s important to me that the choir on tour resembles the membership of the choir back home.

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Holy Week and Easter 2018

Posted on April 17, 2018 by vhk10

I missed singing the Good Friday service last year, but this year I was available for everything except Maundy Thursday. Palm Sunday included Peter Aston’s Hosanna to the Son of David, one of his more mediæval-influenced works, and Leighton’s Solus ad victimam.

Good Friday’s music, for a service of music and readings, was mostly unaccompanied – not sure if this wasn’t partly to do with our organ having been temporarily replaced by a toaster while it’s repaired. I’ve already written about Pseudo-King John IV of Portugal. We brought out Philip Moore’s It is a thing most wonderful again, and although we couldn’t do Lotti’s Crucifixus (‘just couldn’t get the parts’), other items included Morales’ austere Parce mihi Domine, Tchaikovsky’s The Crown of Roses (about which I recommend this page from the local Gurt Lush Choir) and God so loved the world by Stainer.

On Easter Sunday our anthem was Bairstow’s Let all mortal flesh keep silence, which I last sang in St Edmundsbury a couple of years ago – and a lot of unfamiliar descants!

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in praise of … the forgery

Posted on March 30, 2018 by vhk10

For Good Friday we are about to sing Crux fidelis by the person I shall call – following the convention used for Classical authors – Pseudo-King John IV of Portugal. This work obviously fooled the musical world for a while, but its suspicious lack of provenance and anachronistic features (see John Rutter’s edition) point to a 19th-century composer who never got any credit for it.

I’ve recently been considering another work that seems to be at least partly fake. The Erleigh Cantors have occasionally performed a Magnificat in faux-bordon ‘from Robert Fayrfax’ setting on the First Tone’ (which is otherwise unknown), paired with a Nunc ‘by an unknown Edwardine composer from a Chapel Royal Choir Book of 1547’. They were published as Novello’s Parish Choir Book series no. 1062. The editor, Royle Shore, has added a couple of bars of solo descant to the Gloria of each canticle.

I consulted an expert on the revival of Tudor music, and it seems most likely that the Magnificat has some basis somewhere in Fayrfax, such as a few bars extracted from another composition and repeated to make the composed part of the setting. Royle Shore was a solicitor and not a very expert editor, but he wanted to get Church of England parish choirs singing Tudor repertoire.

They’re pleasant enough canticles, though I have never come across any other choir performing them or seen them in a Cathedral choir library. I have to say that I still have my doubts about that Nunc, and suspect Royle Shore of having slipped in one of his own compositions.

As to the ethics of forging a musical composition, the more marginal to musical history the composition would be if genuine, the less it matters. King John IV is famous as a king rather than as a composer, so while his name lends royal glamour to the composition, Crux fidelis is not being attached to an established body of work. Tweaking Fayrfax rather drastically (if that’s what’s been done) is a rather different matter and I wish Royle Shore had been more open about exactly what he did.

I doubt though that Royle Shore made much money from his fake Fayrfax and possibly forged Nunc; and Pseudo-King John (if such a person existed) insinuated their composition into an anthology, so little extra profit there either. Just the satisfaction that their compositions were in print, and perhaps a little glow of smugness at having fooled the musical public. When all’s said and done, Crux Fidelis has survived in the repertory because people enjoy performing and listening to it.

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a dancing palm tree and a light-up whale

Posted on March 26, 2018 by vhk10

A recurring theme this spring is religious pieces in a jazz style. This time it was my first encounter with Jonah-Man Jazz, with the local primary school doing it as an end-of-term performance in church. The church choir provided me and a few other singers and some of the band.

Some 1960s attempts at church/jazz crossover have dated very badly, but this one hasn’t, although Michael Hurd never quite hit the jackpot again. My role was really to reinforce the consonants and keep the rhythm secure (and do a descant at one point). It’s a short work but was expanded in this performance with more narration and some dance numbers. Church was full of appreciative parents and other relatives.

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channelling my inner Benny Hill

Posted on March 22, 2018 by vhk10

Carmina Burana is never going to be a favourite of mine, but this time round I enjoyed it rather more than before. Maybe with a woman conductor there’s a bit more of an air of complicity? At any rate, I confess to preferring the raunchier numbers near the end to all the stuff about spring at the beginning.

We performed it in the arrangement for two pianos and percussion, with two very co-ordinated pianists, and I think 9 percussionists! As usual I was too busy singing to work out what instrument was used when, but I noticed the presence of crotales again. I don’t think the piece loses much by being done in this arrangement, though I’m not perhaps the best judge of that.

Earlier we did Bob Chilcott’s Songs and Cries of London Town, which mix settings of poems about London with street cries. I’ve now got some more material for my garden songbook (a topic for another post) as the first one was largely about herbs.

We joined forces with the Bristol Youth Choir, who also sang Chilcott’s Dances of Time and added parents and supporters to the audience. So we sopranos were pushed right to the back of the choir stalls, where I’m not used to standing (and had occasional problems seeing round the tenor in front, especially when he scratched his ear). Doubtless it will all look different when the hall re-opens; this was our last concert there before the refit.

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the harpsichord playing of my dreams

Posted on March 9, 2018 by vhk10

I didn’t want to miss the Bath Bachfest lunchtime recital of Mahan Esfahani and Michala Petri, either of whom would be a draw on their own. They came to the Guildhall with a programme of music by Handel, Bach, Telemann, Rameau and Chédeville which they played together and individually.

I’m not sure there were especial highlights, though the standard throughout was superb. I particularly enjoyed the Rameau solo harpsichord pieces, which as well as their musical qualities displayed a certain amount of classical learning.

Michala Petri came with a ‘golf caddy’ of assorted recorders, from which she would carefully select an instrument for each piece (‘this trio sonata really needs a 3 wood’). At the end she complimented us for being a very attentive audience and then gave a favourite encore of hers – a set of variations on a Danish folksong, which took her into Classic Buskers territory with all sorts of unusual effects as well as some virtuoso ornamentation.

The recital must have made a deep subliminal impression on me, as about a week later I had an anxiety dream featuring the harpsichord. I realised that I was about to give a solo recital on one in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, and had yet to look at the music, or even get copies of it. Not wishing to lose an opportunity that might not come again, I dashed off to the University Library to find the scores, which included pieces from My Ladye Nevell’s Booke and, rather less plausibly, music by Mahler. There was also going to be a partly improvised duet with the current organ scholar. It makes a change from my usual anxiety dreams, which are almost invariably about the Plato and Aristotle paper I did in Finals (and which in reality I got a satisfactory mark in).

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Opera at the V & A

Posted on March 1, 2018 by vhk10

I caught the V & A’s exhibition Opera: Power, Passion and Politics 10 days or so before it closed (which it has done now – sorry), and found it thought-provoking though not in the ‘unmissable’ category.

The exhibitions centres on seven ‘first nights’ of operas in seven different cities. As it turns out, I’ve only seen one of these works – Le Nozze di Figaro – on stage. They were cleverly chosen to illustrate major developments in the history of opera; for example, the Paris premiè of Tannhäuser did duty both for Wagner and for French grand opera. Inevitably this resulted in quite a bit of compression and the exhibition didn’t pretend to cover the entire history of this art form. This was brought up to date with clips of 20th and 21st-century operas shown at the end.

The focus was very much on social context rather than musical technicalities, although there were a lot of instruments and scores on view. Many items had been loaned, including 18th-century costumes from a former private theatre in Italy and a lot of material from Russia relating to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

A potential problem was the varying amount of documentation for each opera and its contemporary reception. There’s really not much relating to Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, certainly not from Monteverdi himself, or even reactions from his contemporaries, and for different reasons we don’t get much insight into Shostakovich’s own observations on his opera, while Nabucco and Salome are much better documented.

What intrigued me the most were the items which related to the practicalities of staging opera. There was a reconstruction of a Handelian stage set with billowing waves, a moving ship and a mermaid which bobbed up and down. A later visual extract from the Met’s L’Amour de loin showed that nothing much has changed when it comes to wowing people with staging. There was a very detailed diagram showing the blocking for the final scene of an early production of Lady Macbeth.

Probably I wasn’t the intended audience for this exhibition because I was familiar with a lot of the background to these operas, but I found myself spending a generous amount of time in the exhibition which is always a good sign.

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Jenůfa at Hayesfield

Posted on February 28, 2018 by vhk10

Bath Opera have found a new venue; the Roper Theatre at Hayesfield School, which I visited a couple of years ago (when it was brand new) to see my son’s final-year primary school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We were in the front row, which obscured part of the left of the stage, though as the evening went on we got used to this.

I’ve seen this opera once before (in fact it’s the only one by Janáček that I’ve ever been to), when WNO brought it to Bristol, and realising a bit too late that it really wasn’t the opera to see if you’re pregnant.

The principals were for the most part familiar voices to me, apart from Števa, and acted and sang convincingly. The orchestra coped admirably with the demanding music – Janáček works his strings in particular extremely hard. I noticed how each instrument got its moment of glory (the violas were the ones most in my line of view). The staging made very effective use of a gauze curtain to show ‘offstage’ action. (No video backgrounds this time)

It was a chance to support a friend in the chorus. Now where do they find so many men from?! Contrary to the usual way of things, they outnumbered the women.

As usual there was a raffle, and I got really lucky, as I found after the performance that each of the two tickets I’d bought had got attached to a nice bottle of wine. Indeed we may nearly have turned a profit on the evening as a result!

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Come and Sing (2): the Mass in Blue

Posted on February 13, 2018 by vhk10

Six days later, it was a very different though equally challenging take on the Ordinary of the Mass, as Will Todd’s Mass in Blue was the featured work in Bristol Choral Society’s first Come and Sing of 2018. I’d heard a lot about this piece, although I don’t think I’d actually heard it previously.

We gathered a sizeable number of people from far and wide, most of whom hadn’t sung it either, although I was sat next to someone who had. It turned out that the work was extensively revised when OUP published it, and her unrevised earlier edition had considerably more dots even than ours!

Jazz rhythms don’t come naturally to me, but I got the hang of most of them I think, albeit by watching the beat and listening to the bass line in the piano part closely. There were a few bars, though, where I fitted in notes, words and rhythm somehow and simply relied on getting to the first beat of the next bar at the right time. It helps that there is quite a lot of repetition.

The various movements are in different styles; the vocal parts in the Sanctus could almost be by Fauré, while I felt the Gloria had something of a Latin feel (I imagined us, topically, as a backing group on a float at the Rio Carnival).

We were conducted by Hilary Campbell with Vanessa Bowers showing us how it should be done on the solo soprano part and Steven Kings accompanying. Now I am in the position that if I get asked to sing the piece in future I may be one of those who is expected to give a lead….

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