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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hosting a visiting choir

Posted on September 5, 2024 by vhk10

We aren’t on the visiting choir circuit (the last one to come I think was a joint effort 11 years ago), but we did have a guest choir at the end of the summer break, Suzi Digby’s Voce Chamber Choir (Suzi had attended a service at the church a few months ago). As well as motets by Walton (Set me as a seal again!), Stanford and Becky McGlade, there was something we don’t usually have: a mass setting including the Gloria. This was by Lassus, and some enquiries afterwards established it was his Missa Octavi Toni. I was surprised to find out how many Mass settings he’d composed, because I’ve never sung any of them!

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recapitulating the wedding

Posted on August 12, 2024 by vhk10

Bath Abbey Chamber Choir made the second of its Cathedral visits, a rather shorter distance to Bristol Cathedral, where the quire is full of scaffolding and the organ has been dismantled, so we were in temporary stalls in front, and accompanied by a rather faint digital organ.

Our repertoire included two pieces I had, rather surprisingly, not performed in a very long time. I have not sung Ireland’s evening canticles in F in the lifetime of this blog and have done both his Communion in C and (surprisingly) his morning canticles in C many more times. It’s not clear to me why they aren’t done more often.

The anthem was Purcell’s O God, Thou art my God, which I have done just once before, a month before getting married. (Fortuitously, I’d already chosen Purcell’s harmonisation of the final Alleluias for our opening hymn.) Purcell’s verse anthems seem to be very out of favour at present, which may account for the long gap. There are a whole string of them I’d love to do, including Rejoice in the Lord alway, the ‘Bell Anthem’ (another wedding piece). For completeness’ sake, our Responses were Reading.

Back at the ranch (I mean at Bath Abbey) we sang both morning and evening services a week later. Highlights included Darke’s Communion in E, Elgar’s O salutaris Hostia (he set this text several times and I’m not sure which of them I’ve done before though this one seemed familiar), Weelkes’ First Service and another wedding piece, a reprise of Walton’s Set me as a seal, where I did the brief solo this time round.

We were back in August, filling in a gap in the schedule to sing movements from Palestrina’s Missa Brevis, Tallis O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit and Mozart’s Ave Verum. And that really was it for my singing in August this year.

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Kentish apples

Posted on July 30, 2024 by vhk10

Rochester was a Cathedral I sang in early on, and in fact I think it may have been the first Cathedral the Erleigh Cantors ever went to. Certainly it was one of my earliest excursions with them. And neither the choir nor I had been back since.

The quire, Rochester Cathedral

The coat of arms of my College can be seen (its founder is buried here)

Our programme was dominated by one piece: Tallis’ Mass Puer natus est nobis. This is a piece I’d wondered about for a while, and now I found out why I’d never sung any of it: it’s on a huge scale and for seven voices. The notes are not too hard but the test is keeping concentration going over the long span of each movement (less of a problem for the tenors who have a cantus firmus). In the end we omitted the Benedictus as we felt Gloria, Sanctus and Agnus Dei were plenty long enough.

We decided to honour Stanford’s anniversary with a couple of less familiar pieces. Our Communion motet was his Latin 8-part Pater Noster and the canticles at Sunday evensong were his early setting in E flat. The canticles are tuneful enough although there are passages where you feel he was running out of time and had to finish the piece in a hurry by writing some unison bits, and the second soprano part has the limited-range tendency normally associated with alto lines.

Other music included Rachmaninov’s Nunc Dimittis (in English) and the Magnificat by Charles Theodore Pachelbel, son of the more famous composer, slave-owner and organiser of the first public concerts known to have taken place in New York and in Charleston. I took one of the solo parts in the Magnificat. We went for some big-name composers; as well as Rachmaninov, there was Walton (Drop drop slow tears) and Beethoven’s Alleluia again. Also Weelkes’ Gloria in Excelsis Deo and McKie’s (something of a one-piece composer, this) We wait for Thy loving-kindness.

Rochester Cathedral is not as much of a crowd-puller as some, but it has a venerable history, sizeable congregations at our services (albeit with a deanery pilgrimage from Woolwich on the Saturday) and an interesting selection of Cathedral gifts: I passed on the Rochester gin (only because I had enough to carry) but took some local cooking apples home with me. My visit also inspired me to do some research into my family history from the area.

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favourite hymns

Posted on July 8, 2024 by vhk10

I’m not going to actually reveal my favourites here; they change from day to day, and I also have some definite un-favourites!

We hosted an evening of ‘favourite hymns and the stories behind them’ led by Pam Rhodes, in aid of the Spafford Children’s Centre in Jerusalem. I was part of a small group of singers which led our audience and did a Cecil Frances Alexander medley and a couple of descants.

Reflecting on this afterwards, I realise that the category of ‘favourite hymns’ has split into at least two parts. There are the ones that are at least a century or so old, which were the type of hymn used at this church event. But if you are asked to sing at a wedding (and I now tend to avoid doing this, to avoid what I’m about to describe) you tend to get hymns that the couple remember from primary school. Perhaps not ‘favourite’ so much as ‘the only ones we knew’.

The stock of hymns known by different generations is sufficiently different that you can usually tell at funerals whether the hymns were chosen by the deceased themselves (these are usually the most interesting selections), by their spouse or another contemporary of theirs (these tend to be the older sort, and generic ‘favourite hymns’) or by their children. Whoever chooses them, the words are usually taken from some source used by funeral directors which contains variants I have never encountered in any hymnbook.

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Psalm 121 (Howells)

Posted on June 30, 2024 by vhk10

Bristol Choral Society’s season ended with a performance of Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi in the Bristol Beacon, for which we were joined by the return visit of some members of the Hannover Oratorienchor.

This was my second performance of this work in two years (after a very long time since my first performance of it) but it was totally new to almost all the choir. A few of us had sung the Hymnus before, and an even smaller number had not but had sung the related Requiem; for many Howells was a totally new composer so there was a distinctive idiom to become familiar with as well as the notes.

It didn’t take me too much effort to dust off the notes again, but there were some differences from last year in Gloucester. One was that we used a scaled-back orchestration which dispensed with brass and woodwind and made more prominent use of the organ. With the full orchestra version fresh in my mind, I noticed the absence of wind sonorities, but there were advantages. Last year when I enquired about some dynamic markings in the final movement I was told that beyond a certain point you just had to ignore them, as the orchestration was too heavy. With some instruments missing it was possible to be more subtle. The organ in the Beacon isn’t back in place yet so we had a digital substitute.

I was also in the semi-chorus this time (as I was when I first sang this, I think). Or at least most of it, as there was some redistribution of semi-chorus passages for full choir. Doing it I came to appreciate how the semichorus is used to change the mood, injecting some reflection and melancholy into an apparently joyous moment.

Our tenor soloist Nick Pritchard sang Finzi’s Dies Natalis which I was unfamiliar with despite Finzi having been a cult composer when I was a student. The programme began with Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music, sung (as before with this choir) entirely by the choir without soloists so we got rather more to do than in some performances.

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Abbey round-up: May/June 2024

Posted on June 20, 2024 by vhk10

Bath Abbey Chamber Choir these days is being given quite a mix of services to sing, not just 9.30 am ones as it looked like at one time. May began with an evensong which included Ireland’s canticles in F, which I had not sung for many years although I remembered them almost exactly. (Lack of competition in the area of Te Deums and Jubilates means I’ve done his morning canticles much more often). Also on the menu were Byrd’s Prevent us O Lord and Hadley’s My beloved spake.

At the end of May at an 11.30 Eucharist we included Robert Walker’s As the apple tree, with the aleatoric touch that was fashionable at the time it was written. Here it takes the form of singing a phrase with note lengths of your choosing and also beginning at a time of your choice. My problem is that all the training I’ve had in keeping in time with the singer next to me is very hard to discard! Alongside it were movements from Palestrina’s Missa Brevis and as an introit Hail Gladdening Light by Wood. Not only did we sing ‘The lights of evening round us shine’ at 9.30 a.m., we sang ‘The rains are over and gone’ just before a torrential downpour!

We completed the pattern of services in June by doing a 9.30 Eucharist with just two anthems: de Sévérac’s Tantum Ergo and Walton’s Set me as a seal.

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