carols in the nave

Posted on December 8, 2024 by vhk10

I didn’t take much part in the Christmas season, but I returned to Gloucester Cathedral for a session singing from ‘100 Carols for Choirs’ while visitors to the Cathedral strolled around during an open evening. Mostly carols that were well-known to me, although I don’t think I’d ever sung ‘Mary’s lullaby’ by John Rutter before.

In the absence of any other volunteers I put myself forward for the Once in Royal solo. I’ve done this just once before, in my village church when I was in my mid-twenties. A chance to find out that you can be heard all over the Cathedral without having to put in a great deal of effort. But I do see why at King’s the boy who sings it only learns at the last minute that he’s been selected – it doesn’t give any time to become nervous. It is less anxiety-inducing of course when you aren’t starting off the whole event and there aren’t millions listening to you.

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German romantics at Bristol Cathedral

Posted on November 28, 2024 by vhk10

November was a potentially a busy month and my next outing a week later was a concert with Bristol Choral Society of (mostly) German Romantic music in Bristol Cathedral. Actually looking at the origins of the composers, they include two Austrians, a Hungarian, a Czech and someone from Liechtenstein, but it seems the most apt overall description.

Most of the programme was rather slow and gentle, so we began with something zippier: Bach’s motet Lobet den Herrn, familiar to me but less so to many others in the choir.

Mendelssohn’s Verleih uns Frieden was a piece I’d somehow missed. A straightforward soprano line but with some lovely moments for the other voices. It was followed by an Ave Regina by Rheinberger (whom everyone seems to be performing at the moment) and the more familiar Geistliches Lied by Brahms.

The Bruckner anniversary reappeared, this time with his last motet Vexilla Regis, which for me is the greatest of them all, with its shifting harmonies and the ambivalent mood of its ending. If I were a Cathedral director of music I’d make it a regular feature of music lists in Passiontide. This was followed by Liszt’s Ave maris stella, which is rather more straightforward than other church music by him that I’ve done, apart from a chromatic middle section. We ended with Mendelssohn’s Hear my prayer, which we will take on tour next year.

The programme was broken up by some organ and solo soprano pieces. The whole concert had a very pleasant atmosphere, and I particularly liked the low lighting over the audience, so we saw rows of faces receding into darkness far back in the nave.

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a mystery recital

Posted on November 18, 2024 by vhk10

The Assembly Rooms filled up – and at least one choir practice room practically emptied – the night Sir András Schiff came to give his recital at the Bath Mozartfest. He didn’t announce his programme in advance although as it turned out of it much was familiar to me, indeed pieces that have been in my repertoire.

One was Mozart’s Fantasia in C minor, which was a Grade 8 set piece although of course I was not able to impart the variety and sense of improvisation that Sir András did. Another was Haydn’s double Variations in F minor, which I learnt shortly after the Mozart. Another piece that I definitely have not learnt to play was Haydn’s final sonata in E flat which would never have been within my abilities!

The recital opened with a prelude from the ’48’ and also included one of Mozart’s sonatas (I’m afraid to say that writing some time later I can’t now remember which one). Each piece received a somewhat discursive introduction and Sir András had his audience in the palm of his hand. He would probably have carried on far into the night if there hadn’t been a time limit on locking up the Assembly Rooms!

Others in the family went to concerts given by the Pavel Haas Quartet (who very much followed the lead of their first violin) and the Amatis Trio.

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choir and brass

Posted on November 12, 2024 by vhk10

The first of my two November concerts was in Gloucester Cathedral and brought in a brass ensemble to accompany us as well as the organ.

The single largest piece was Joseph Jongen’s Mass of the Blessed Sacrament. Jongen is known to me (and then only rather dimly) as a composer of organ music, but was quite prolific as a choral composer. My hire copy of the Mass was well-thumbed from several performances, and OUP clearly thought it worthwhile to publish it.

As usual when singing a work by a composer I’d never performed before, I had to get used to their turns of phrase and favourite harmonic progressions. One part of the Mass, the setting of the words et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, had me racking my brains to locate the other piece it really reminded me of, until I identified it as a few bars from A Child of our Time. But in general Jongen was distinctive and varied enough to keep my interest.

The second part of the concert paid tribute to the Bruckner anniversary with Locus iste, Ave Maria and Ecce Sacerdos, the last bringing in our brass ensemble. The concert ended with a sequence of polychoral music by Giovanni Gabrieli, where the brass replaced some vocal lines. We started with that Erleigh Cantors standard Jubilate Deo, then the more sober Passiontide O Domine Jesu Christe and finally a strenuous setting of the opening of the Easter Exultet.

There was an experimental early start which had some advantages for me: easier to fill in time before the concert and enabling me to go there by train.

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the great and the good in the nave

Posted on November 8, 2024 by vhk10

A gala dinner was organised in aid of Gloucester Cathedral funds, with performances from the various Cathedral choirs, and held in the nave. The Choral Society performed near the end of this, and we fitted it in after our usual rehearsal ended early. We sang three pieces from memory, all very well known so not involving really hard work to memorise: the Hallelujah Chorus, Locus iste and I was glad. It had to be from memory as the main illumination was the candles on the tables, laid out in parallel lines east-west rather like those in a College dining hall.

I’d been told that there were all sorts of famous and notable local people there, but I didn’t try to identify any of them.

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the B minor Mass at St Luke’s

Posted on November 7, 2024 by vhk10

Next up was a workshop day on Bach’s Mass in B minor, hosted by Neil Moore and Bath Cantata Group prior to a forthcoming performance. Readers who’ve been with me a long time know that I don’t have much history with this particular work, although I did get to sing it in Wells Cathedral some years back. I’m still on the lookout for opportunities to do so again and an event like this was the next best thing. I even hoped I might acquit myself well enough to be roped in as a bumper for the concert performance, but no such luck.

There were surprisingly few people I knew there, apart from people I’d sung with in the Cantata Group (I haven’t been able to do so for a while because it rehearses on the same night as the Abbey Chamber Choir). There were quite a number from another Bath choir which had sung the work recently, and one or two who’d also been in the SW Festival Chorus’ performance along with me.

St Luke’s Wellsway is a long and narrow church, sadly organ-less. The choir sat in many rows, with three or four 2nd sopranos in each row and the tenors and basses a long way back. This disconcerted some of the first sopranos next to us, as there was a high chance of sitting next to someone singing a different part from you, and not everyone can cope with that.

We got through all the choral parts of the work, though some were dealt with rather briefly (I’d have like more time on the Sanctus and Hosannas, for example). I didn’t remember it quite as well as I expected, but there are a lot of dots there after all. Now all I need is another concert performance.

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Mathias and Matins at York

Posted on October 31, 2024 by vhk10

Testing in an aisle for the evening’s light show.

The Erleigh Cantors were due to visit York in 2020 and we’ve had to wait for our turn to conquer the North (the furthest north we’d been before this was Lichfield). Most of the music we used was drawn from our previous repertoire, although not necessarily recently performed.

The style a friend calls ‘Anglican spiky’ was prominent in our music choices. As well as Leighton’s Responses as our setting for the weekend, there were two works by William Mathias: his Jubilate setting ‘Make a joyful noise’ and Missa Aedis Christi. In general, I feel that with a couple of exceptions Mathias’ music is unfairly neglected now: his Jesus College canticles, for example, deserve more outings than they get. Perhaps this is the influence of second sopranos, as there were several entries for us in the Mass on notes which appeared to be there to generate the correct amount of dissonance, without relating in any sensible way to what had preceded them.

Detail of Garden of Eden banner. Spot the avocet!


Spiky in a different way were Kelly’s Evening Canticles in C, with their bouncy rhythms and tricky unaccompanied stretch in the Nunc. (Actually it’s not singing that stretch that’s the problem, it’s the moment of truth when the organ comes back in.) We sang these on the Sunday evening, completing the big sing with Bairstow’s Lord, Thou has been our refuge. Earlier on Sunday we’d had a rare chance to sing Matins, and paired the Matthias Jubilate with Elgar’s extended setting of the Te Deum, a piece I love but for obvious reasons rarely get a chance to sing. This time round I noticed how the gently descending motif which occurs throughout the piece in the accompaniment is withheld from the voice parts until the penultimate phrase.

Make your Mark

We included a couple of Marian pieces: Paul Mealor’s O Sanctissima Maria from our most recent concert and Góoreck’s Totus Tuus (to make use of the acoustic). The one new piece to me was Joanna Forbes l’Estrange’s Drop drop, slow tears, written in memory of James Bowman which tells you how new it is. This had some archaising moments, but if you follow my travels with the Erleigh Cantors you’ll know that we always include a piece of genuinely early music. This time it was Pelham Humfrey’s canticles, which I must have heard a few times sung by other people, as it is a very long time since I sang them myself and yet they seemed immediately quite familiar.

A visit to York is not complete without a trip to Make Your Mark and I bought a wooden stamp block to help name my music (important when you buy a lot of your own copies). Sadly Mulberry Hall, one of my favourite shops anywhere for its wondrous displays of china and glass, is no more.

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an extract from the gardening songbook

Posted on October 16, 2024 by vhk10

At some point I should post about the selection of songs I occasionally sing snatches of while gardening because of their appropriateness. I selected one – used as I pull up bindweed – for my contribution to the second recital in our autumn series, given by a selection of performers from the church who volunteered their services. I had to take care to unlearn some incorrectly memorised bits from my outdoor performances.

Misalliance is one of the less well-known Flanders and Swann collaborations, and while it might seem very different from Swann’s Requiem for the Living, it shares the moral that the world would be a better place if we all stopped worrying about our differences and got on together. Of course one cannot replicate (and shouldn’t try to) the comic timing of the original performers, and I borrowed some ideas from a King’s Singers arrangement.

We were given a free hand in what we chose to perform and this caused a number of us to gravitate to the lighter end of the repertoire, though we pulled out two pieces from the choir’s normal repertory at the end.

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the composer from Frome

Posted on September 30, 2024 by vhk10

Christ Church Bath is hosting another Saturday afternoon recital series this autumn and (having missed all of last year’s) I went to the opening concert, given by the strings of the Trowbridge Symphony Orchestra with David Winters on organ and conducted by Philip Draisey.

It began with one of Handel’s organ concertos, pieces that I think of as standard fillers in choral concerts to give the singers a rest. And in fact that is how they started life, as interludes during performances of Messiah, which must have made it very long if there were no cuts!

There followed two elegies, one by Parry and then an Elegie by William Henry Reed, now best known as Elgar’s friend and biographer, but a prolific composer and a local one too, as he came from Frome. He was also involved in the Three Choirs Festival and the Elegie was commissioned by Gloucester Choral Society (despite having no choral element in it).

The concert ended with Respighi’s Suite for Strings and Organ, a more expansive work and like a lot of Respighi employing conscious archaisms, so completing the symmetry of the programme. I sensed that the composer intended it to be played by a rather more powerful organ than we had here.

The concert was very well attended and preceded by home-made refreshments.

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the other 2024 anniversary

Posted on September 16, 2024 by vhk10

Visiting London for a conference, I was able to take in the only Prom of the season with any hardcore Second Viennese School in it, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tarmo Peltokoski. Schoenberg’s anniversary has not received a great deal of attention and it’s been necessary to look quite hard for performances in among all the Bruckner and Stanford.

I was unfamiliar with his violin concerto (played by Patricia Kopatchinskaja), and it’s hard to take in on a first hearing. My main difficulty was that I found it rather disjointed and the structure was hard to discern, but some reviews indicated that this was a quality of this particular performance.

Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony on the other hand is known to me in great detail as it was a set work for my A level Music course. I thought this was a good all-round performance without being particularly blown away by any part of it. I’m used to rather bitty Proms programmes but the evening began, rather incongruously, with Vaughan Williams’ short Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’. The juxtaposition reminded me of when the readings at a church service appear to have little to do with one another and the poor preacher tries to find something to connect them.

There was a sizeable audience, but one that was more attentive than most other recent Proms audiences I’ve encountered recently. I’m now having to pick my concerts carefully in order to make sure I’m among such people. I went for a box again, reasoning that this would also minimise the chance of disruptive neighbours, and this time ensured I was well away from partitions.

Some reviews:

Seen and Heard International
Guardian
Backtrack

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