review of the year – 2016

Posted on January 24, 2017 by vhk10

And what a year it was. I sang in the Three Choirs Festival Chorus. I sang lots of choral masterpieces (and Carmina Burana) for the first time. I made my débuts in several new venues, sang before a member of the Royal Family and discovered the benefits of the colour-coded post-it tab. On a sadder note, I have been saying a rather protracted farewell to a choir I’ve sung with for a long time. I’m going to write the year up as a set of awards, moving towards the less serious ones at the end of the list.

Performance of the Year. It’s not going to be possible to single out just one. For overall memorability and significance, I will nominate two. Firstly, the Berlioz Grande Messe des Morts in the Three Choirs Festival. Someone in the audience tweeted ‘Tonight, perhaps for the first time in my life, I heard utter perfection.’ Even if he was exaggerating, what a thing it is to be part of making someone say that. Secondly, my first performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in November.

Building of the Year. Step forward Gloucester Cathedral. The setting for all the Three Choirs concerts, but I wasn’t finished with it after that – I returned in the autumn for a weekend with the Erleigh Cantors and then for the Missa Solemnis. At one point I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing the cloisters floating around, but there are worse things to see that way.

The Best New Venue Award. This is a tie between the Lord Mayor’s Chapel (one day I’ll get to dep in the choir there – I’ve been on the list as long as John Marsh has been organist!) and the Bath Assembly Rooms – a short walk from my home, but rarely performed in by amateurs. Other new venues include the Anvil Basingstoke, and St John’s Church Keynsham.

The ‘Poulenc Gloria’ Award. For the new (to me) piece which came round in unconnected performances in quick succession. Walton’s Coronation Te Deum, which I sang in the 3 Choirs Festival (and with Bristol Choral Society), and 3 months later with the Erleigh Cantors. A special bonus for the fact that the 3 Choirs and Erleigh Cantors performances were in the same place, which isn’t one of my most frequent performance venues.

The ‘Meet the Composer’ Award. This goes to Alexander L’Estrange, whose music I sang twice in as many weeks, with him being present with his band on both occasions.

The Best Rehearsal Moment Award. When rehearsing a notoriously hard piece of choral writing, we were asked to stand up, and then sit down if we realised we’d made a mistake, as a visual demonstration of where problems were occurring. After rehearsing one particular passage, an entire section of the choir was found to be seated. (I myself was still standing, but would have been sitting if we’d tried the same exercise in other parts of the rehearsal!)

The Obstructive Fellow Singer Award. There were several who inadvertently tried to prevent me from giving a good performance, including:

  • the woman whose beehive hairdo was held in place by vast quantities of hairspray. Singing next to her I felt as if I was glue-sniffing
  • the fellow singer who could not sing in 5/4 without beating time, but not in the same time as the conductor
  • the singer in front of me who was usually on the back row of their choir, and who swayed around so much that I had to peer on first one side then the other in order to watch the conductor. This was relayed round the building on the big screens, to the entertainment of some in the audience

All the performing meant I didn’t actually attend as many performances as usual, but I did get to ENO’s staging of Lulu, the Proms performance of the Royal Opera Boris with Bryn Terfel, and a very local Das Lied von der Erde.

As for ambitions for 2017? There’s nothing very dramatic planned, but you never know what’s going to come up during the year. Maybe I’ll get to do a solo with a choir I’ve been singing with for a quarter of a century. I know there are several in it who would like to hear me do so and have told me it’s long overdue! At any rate I’m going to renew my acquaintance with the Peterborough Chamber Choir (Salisbury in February), go back to St David’s in July, and finally bring the Cathedral Chamber Choir to Wells in June.

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A Cathedral Christmas

Posted on January 23, 2017 by vhk10

I don’t think I’ve ever spent Christmas within easy reach of a Cathedral before. But this year I managed it by staying just outside St David’s, with a 10-minute stroll through some lanes to the Cathedral. I went to three services, sometimes accompanied by others in the family.

I enjoyed the standard of singing, particularly from the trebles, but perhaps what was most striking musically were the organ improvisations at Midnight Mass – it’s a long time since I’ve heard any that extravagant. There were other incidental pleasures such as the apparently rather stylish Welsh translation of O little town of Bethlehem, which preserves the internal rhymes in the third and seventh lines of each verse. George Malcolm’s Missa ad presepe, which I introduced to Priory Voices. And a chance to go to Matins on the morning of Christmas Day.

I’d make a couple of pleas:
a) check that only the microphones that are needed are switched on. At the 9 Lessons, it was only after lesson 6 that I found out what the choir sounded like. Until a stray microphone was switched off at that point, all I could hear from where I was (right up at the east end) was the amplified voice of one of the tenor lay-clerks.

b) one of your vergers on duty at Midnight Mass must be among the tallest men in St Davids. If he’d swapped places with the verger next to him and sat in the end of a row, he would not have blocked anyone’s view!

This was also a useful opportunity to case the joint for the Ereigh Cantors’ weekend in St David’s next July.

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a lot of carol singing

Posted on January 12, 2017 by vhk10

I got through quite a lot of carols and Christmas hymns this year. We had the usual Advent and Christmas carols services at church, and the Christmas one brought some new pieces: Philip Stopford’s setting of the Coventry Carol and somehow I’d managed to miss singing The little road to Bethlehem. The arrangement of the latter for unaccompanied choir still betrays its origins as a solo song.

I went to the school carol service in Bath Abbey. I always approach this occasion with wariness, as I’m now very bad at being in congregations and often I’m surrounded by people who chat throughout, not even listening to their own children performing for them. This year was a bit different; I had a neighbour who was clearly familiar with all the hymns (not all of them very well known), but who unfortunately had a rollercoaster-like portamento, both up and down. He covered his ear so he couldn’t hear anyone singing any differently from him. I wonder if he plagues a church congregation somewhere?

At another short carol service the hymns received a gloopy accompaniment with added ‘strings’, like a rather less tasteful version of the scoring of Jesus’ words in the St Matthew Passion. (The accompanist was clearly an enthusiast for ‘worship songs’ and performed for us one she’d written herself.) By the third carol, O come all ye Faithful, some of us decided to subvert this and we startled her by launching into the descant. This seems to be quite generally known (if mis-remembered in one or two places) as you quite often hear it sung informally, for example at the ‘Carols in the Circus’ which I went to the first half-hour of.

I revived local carol singing and recruited a few others via church and the Streetlife website, to go round Sion Hill. This was generally well received, although there is only a short window of time where you catch everyone; too early, and people have not returned from work, too late and some will refuse to answer the door.

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Messiah back on the book

Posted on January 12, 2017 by vhk10

The annual Bristol Choral Society Messiah came round again. The choir started singing the piece from memory while Adrian Partington was musical director, building it up with a few more choruses each year. With a change of conductor and an influx of new singers into the choir, it was decided to revert to using copies this year, but as little as possible. We also did slightly different choruses, including dropping Lift up your heads (the second part of which is a piggy to memorise if you want to get it exactly right) and Let us break their bonds (a particularly nerve-racking one to sing from memory).

We had a different orchestra this time too – the Corelli Orchestra – but were still at baroque pitch. The earlier ‘Mini Messiah’ highlights for children attracted an audience of about 1500 and seem to be a firm part of Christmas for many Bristolians.

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Aaaaaah …. Neptune

Posted on December 31, 2016 by vhk10

I thought I had sung in enough major orchestral works for the first time for one year, but another came up at short notice; the wordless chorus in the final movement of Holst’s Planets suite. This was put on by the Keynsham Orchestra, conducted by Mark Gateshill, in St. John’s, Keynsham, a handsome church which I’ve seen many times without ever having entered. It boasts a impressive brass candelabrum which would not disgrace any cathedral, elaborate monuments, and lots of needlepoint kneelers. The concert was well attended with large slabs of home-made cake on sale in the interval.

Holst asks for the choir to be in a separate room, but the most practical solution was for us to be tucked behind a pillar, with a view of the conductor. The chorus part is not totally simple (for one thing, it isn’t in the same key signature as the rest). The second soprano part, which I was doing, is a lot less strenuous than the first. Singers came from Bristol Choral Society and the Chew Valley Choral Society.

Earlier we’d heard Berlioz’ arrangement of the Rákóczi March (I’m not particularly keen on national music in general, but this piece makes me wish I were Hungarian or failing that French) and Seren Nickson and Erin Cacace were the young and accomplished soloists in Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante.

Meanwhile, my husband went to hear the Piatti Quartet in the old Theatre Royal and was impressed; the Bath Recital Artists’ Trust get some good performers. The programme ended with Schubert’s string quintet, which he believes he hadn’t heard live before, because he didn’t know how the cello parts were distributed. It also included music by Haydn, Frank Bridge and John Hawkins.

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another calendrical plea

Posted on December 30, 2016 by vhk10

I made this request at the end of 2005 and here it comes again.

Every year I buy a calendar with photographs of British Cathedrals. The format has varied – perhaps they haven’t all been produced by the same publisher – but it’s often been called ‘Cathedrals and Greater Churches of Britain’. Our 2016 calendar was produced by Judge Sampson. I like to buy it when singing in a Cathedral with a visiting choir, along with Christmas cards depicting the Cathedral, so I can support it.

This year I drew a blank. Gloucester were selling one of their own with 12 views of Gloucester Cathedral. Wells likewise had a Wells-specific one. Southwark Cathedral shop, which I visited in November, had cleared calendars off their shelves ‘because the manager wants the space for Christmas stock’. (Evidently it hasn’t occurred to them that some people give calendars as Christmas presents, or indeed that they are most likely to sell them at the end of the year. I wonder how many unsold 2017 calendars they will have left over?) Other Cathedral shops I’ve tried, such as Lichfield, Bristol and St David’s, weren’t selling them. You can’t order from Judge Sampson direct online, or even find out what their range is.

So if anyone has seen such a calendar on sale, especially if there are still copies on sale now, I’d be interested to know!

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what’s top of the bucket list now?

Posted on December 26, 2016 by vhk10

Like many singers I have a ‘bucket list’ of the works I would like to sing and have never done. For as far back as I can remember until 2008, the work at the top of it was Bach’s B minor Mass. From then till very recently, it has been Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. In November, the top slot was probably occupied by Belshazzar’s Feast, for all of one week. And now it should be…. er…. um….?

I’m now a bit stuck for an answer to this one. There are a lot of candidates: The Bells, The Seasons, the Christmas Oratorio, The Apostles, Mass settings by Bruckner, Poulenc and Haydn, among others. But nothing really stands out. If I have to pick something it would not be a full-length work, but the chorus in Mahler 2. I did get offered a chance to sing it a couple of years ago, but 8 hours or so of rehearsal before the day of the concert seemed excessive. Now there is a projected Mahler 2 in the near future – watch this space!

I have another bucket list of service music rather than concert pieces. The top piece here is the Mag and Nunc from William Byrd’s Great Service, but here I’m in the position of being able to organise a performance myself if I’m keen enough.

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Belshazzar’s Feast with a pounding heart

Posted on December 22, 2016 by vhk10

On to Belshazzar (I would say ‘onwards and upwards’ but I don’t think there is any ‘upwards’, in any sense, after the Missa Solemnis). I have had terrible difficulties driving to rehearsals in Bristol this term, and tried to get round them by going to this concert on the train, and arranging to catch the train before the one I needed to. Failure! All trains were cancelled and I was put on the dreaded ‘replacement bus’ which arrived at Temple Meads station around the time I should have been at Colston Hall. I ran from the station to the hall, struggled to find the way on to the stage (I was not on the usual side of the stage and it lurked behind a fire door) and got into place after the rehearsal had started. Fortunately the first page doesn’t involve the sopranos. Less fortunately, my temples were now pounding, and not in time with the beat.

I did manage to get a warning out via social media about what had happened as I was in the semi-chorus which would have left a noticeable gap.

Belshazzar is a new work to me. I’d sung most of Walton’s church music, with the exception of The Twelve, which gave help with turns of phrase. But the continually shifting rhythms just had to be learnt as they were. Apart from the semi-chorus parts, it all came together for me at a fairly late stage. The Philharmonia gave great colour to the orchestral writing. I was near the percussion and greatly enjoyed the special effects such as the resonant ‘god of iron’. My interpretation of ‘Slain!’ was modelled on Brenda Rae’s Todesschrei, and David Soar our soloist had also appeared in Lulu at ENO.

It was programmed alongside the now-familiar Coronation Te Deum, and as Adrian Partington was conducting, this was as in the Three Choirs Festival. Also on the programme were two overtures about English places: Portsmouth Point and Elgar’s Cockaigne.

Afterwards Bristol Choral Society held its farewell event for Adrian, with a presentation, speeches, a toast and lots of food!

Many of us sang Belshazzar again a few days later in St David’s Hall, joining forces with the BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales for a performance broadcast live on Radio 3 (still on iPlayer at the time of writing), with Neal Davies as soloist. Martyn Brabbins conducted, broadly in line with the way we’d sung it the previous Saturday. I was relieved of my semi-chorus duties, and so able to enjoy listening to all the semi-chorus passages.

The programme for this concert also included Elgar’s In the South and Delius’ Double Concerto, with Tasmin Little and Paul Watkins. People were especially impressed with the Delius; I can’t really comment as I have Delius immunity.

Reviews of Cardiff performance:

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The Missa Solemnis is singable

Posted on November 24, 2016 by vhk10

So the great day finally came round, and I got to sing the Missa Solemnis with Gloucester Choral Society and the Bristol Ensemble in Gloucester Cathedral.

I wrote earlier of the particular difficulties of performing this piece. It wasn’t Beethoven’s fault that pitch has risen since his day, but I am left with the impression that LvB believed sopranos would explode if they came into prolonged contact with the stave. There are some gratuitously difficult lines, such as the bar where the soprano soloist goes from a high A to a high B via a brief detour to a note an octave lower. With familiarity the notes in the chorus part came more readily, though it may be beyond my powers to make them sound easy. And perhaps this work is not meant to sound easy. I gather that Prof. Nicholas Marston (still known to me as Nick, from the days when he returned to his undergraduate College choir to sing alongside me) made this point in his talk about the work.

In fact I found that the pacing actually worked. On the only page where my voice came unstuck, we’d been asked to reinforce an alto lead, so we were singing one more bar than Beethoven had assigned to us. I think that this is only possible with a careful choice of tempi, by enjoying the gentler passages when they come round, consciously releasing tension before the really hard bits, and of course by not giving all in rehearsal. The final proof that this approach worked was that I was able to sing a chunk of the verse section in Stainer’s I saw the Lord in church the following morning.

The Missa Solemnis is not quite the rarity it once was; in fact there was a performance in Cardiff the same night as this one. But it has not been performed in Bath since 1982, so if I hadn’t made a move this time I might not have had another opportunity for a while. I hope one does come round before too long though, because having learnt the Mass thoroughly I would love to sing it again.

Two sublime, radical works in the space of eight days: it gets no better than this.

[January 2017: I’ve now listened to a CD of the concert, which gives an idea of how it sounded if you were in front of rather than in the midst of the performers. It is very tempting to try and pick out one’s own contribution when doing this, but although some individual chorus sopranos are audible, I’m not among them. The recording does confirm my impressions of the performance in various ways.]

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Bath Mozartfest 2016

Posted on November 22, 2016 by vhk10

There has been so much going on that this report is going to be rather brief. Between us we got to three concerts.

My husband went to hear Winterreise in the Guildhall, performed by Roderick Williams and Roger Vignoles, which he enjoyed, although he felt that the chosen keys weren’t quite right. The interpretation moved towards the resigned rather than the despairing.

Later we went with a party of mathematicians to a generously long lunchtime concert also in the Guildhall of music for piano four hands, played by Simon Crawford-Phillip and Philip Moore (not the composer of that name). This paired Mozart’s variations K501 and Sonata K497 with Ravel’s arrangement of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Philip Moore’s own arrangement of the Firebird suite (or rather, of extracts from it). The Ravel arrangement of Debussy probably came off best. The two pianists swapped positions between pieces.

Angela Hewitt played Scarlatti, Mozart and Beethoven in the Assembly Rooms and my husband luckily got a return. There was some grumbling in the audience about her Fazioli piano, but she’s a regular here and clearly enjoys visiting.

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an unsatisfactory seat at ENO

Posted on November 13, 2016 by vhk10

After watching from a distance some belated but spectacular fireworks originating (I was told) at Somerset House, I went to the new production of Lulu at English National Opera.

I have already seen this production in the cinema. The distinguishing feature was the drawings by William Kentridge which were projected on the backdrop. After a while I didn’t pay too much attention to them (for the reason given below), though some made an impression, such as the drawing of Berg himself, apparently looking on at the opera he never lived to see staged.

More to my liking was the mute actor, Joanna Dudley, who was on stage throughout, interpreting the events through her body language. She was very impressive, not least in her ability to sustain some of the attitudes she adopted. Although I could imagine that, as with Berg’s music, with only slight changes she would have been intolerable. (The other, male, mute actor didn’t do much for me. He was dressed as a butler and often struck the absurdly bent-over pose some people adopt when they are trying to move unobserved and which has exactly the opposite effect.)

At this well-attended performance I was seated in the Upper Circle, in the middle of row E. The drawback with this was that the orchestra didn’t come across as strongly as they would have done in the stalls or dress circle. So rather unusually for a performance of Berg, the singers dominated. Perhaps this was not a bad thing as Lulu herself was not hugely powerful.

Another problem with my location was that in Act II the projected drawings were not completely visible because the top of them disappeared into the safety curtain; so, for example, I could not identify any of the faces. In addition, the mime artist was now on stage right, and the head of the person in front of me often blocked out either her or the main action. This problem disappeared in Act III along with the neighbour to my left. Perhaps he was suffering Bergnot or, conversely, was a purist who would not accept the completion of Act III; more likely he felt he needed an early night to nurse the cold he was clearly suffering from.

I was happy with all the performances, which included Willard White (last heard as Elijah at 3 Choirs) as Schigolch. Kudos to ENO for a very informative programme, including Cerha’s account of what the completion of Act III entailed. I was left pondering as often why a composer whose music is not exactly lacking in emotion was drawn to such a chilly subject; did he regard it as a challenge?

There are loads and loads of reviews and other blog posts about this. Here are some of them:

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Two festivals merge

Posted on November 12, 2016 by vhk10

The Bath International Music Festival is to merge with the Bath Literature Festival into a single festival that will run for 10 days in May 2017 and 17 days in subsequent years, with a greater rôle for jazz.

This can be seen as a return to the more inclusive Festival that once used to exist. A few years ago it got rid of non-musical events, some of which (such as walks led by local historian Kirsten Elliott) were snapped up by the Literature Festival. Ever since then the programme of the Music Festival has looked a bit thin, and the branding of Bath as a ‘Festival City’ did not do it any favours. There is a danger of course that the music could become a sideshow to the literature events, which are much less expensive to put on.

Let’s measure this development against the open letter I wrote a few years ago, with suggestions about the festival. It certainly fulfils two of the headings Establish primacy and It’s not just music. I suspect a combined Festival might also be able to deal better with Street Publicity, Know your audience and some of the others, because the Literature Festival has always given the impression of being very well run and promoted. If there’s one single change I’d like to see to the musical side of the combined Festival, it would be the return of the Assembly Rooms as a venue.

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