Cambridge Surprise Major

Posted on April 29, 2016 by vhk10

The Cathedral Chamber Choir’s Low Sunday weekend in Cambridge was a nostalgia trip for some of us, and was divided between two venues. On Saturday we were in Queens’ College Chapel, where we were left to our own devices to sing Bairstow’s Blessed City and Walmisley in D minor. The characterful organ is still at old Philharmonic pitch. Getting to sing in a College Chapel outside of term (unless there is a strong connexion such as being the choir of a College living) is not easy and it probably helped that our conductor had been organ scholar at Queens’.

I had had a bad cough for several days and on Sunday, when we were due to sing Matins and Evensong at Great St Mary’s, I woke feeling sure that I would have to desert the choir and sit in the congregation. However, when actually called upon to sing, enough voice came back, and where I found the top A in Ireland’s Greater Love I’ll never know. In the morning we sang canticles which were new to me: Francis Jackson’s Benedicite, which has the relatively rare combination of being quick to learn but musically interesting, and a Jubilate by Britten in E flat. The latter was not published in the composer’s lifetime, which is a pity as it’s rather better than the usual one in C; it was written around the same time as AMDG, which was also left unpublished.

I sang at Great St Mary’s a couple of times when I was a student. In those days the tradition of a Sunday evening service built around an address by a distinguished visiting preacher lingered on, and my College choir was asked to sing an anthem (we chose Wood’s O Thou the Central Orb) at the start of one such service. We were free to go straight afterwards, but we timed our exit too late, and the entire choir made a dash for it after the speaker had begun his sermon, feeling very embarrassed afterwards. Corpus also rose high enough in the choral rankings to be asked to sing the Advent Carol Service there one year.

This time, our choir got a free tower tour including the ringing chamber. I was able to verify that spikes now ensure that the greatest exploits of Whipplesnaith at King’s couldn’t now be repeated, and made do with singing Howells’ Coll. Reg. evening canticles instead.

We were fortunate in our organists: Nick Morris and Doug Tang.

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church choir ghosts

Posted on April 29, 2016 by vhk10

Gradually going round the national patron saints, I went to sing at a St George’s day service at a church I used to attend. There is now an occasional ‘festival choir’ instead of the one that used to sing every Sunday, though including many of the same people. And also some blasts from the past, including me I suppose, but also some returning children of choir members.

This is a known phenomenon of church choirs: the former members (generally children of existing members who’ve grown up and moved on) whose presence still lingers with those choirs in spirit. They will occasionally reappear, in particular to get married, and after you’ve been in the choir a few years you are assumed to know them well, even if you never actually overlapped with them in the choir. So far this is harmless enough, but it can get nasty. In one church choir I sang in (not in Bath!) I was always found inadequate by the mother of a former choir member who had left just before I joined, and whom I had in some sense replaced. When I met this daughter we got on perfectly happily, but as long as I remained in that choir I was seen as some sort of threat to her memory, even though she wasn’t ever going to come back!

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Five sell-outs

Posted on April 28, 2016 by vhk10

Public booking for the 3 Choirs Festival started earlier this month. I had priority booking as a chorus member, though my account has been disabled and no one is able to reinstate it. I managed to grab some tickets when public booking opened (the system was able to handle demand, unlike, say the ROH’s) but by then the nave of Gloucester Cathedral was sold out for five of the six concerts I’m singing in (not the one with Carmina Burana in). Possibly it had been sold out for a while, so it would have made little difference if I’d used priority booking. This is, let me remind you, over three months before the festival itself.

I’m delighted to be singing to a packed Cathedral night after night, but at the same time I wonder why, if choral concerts sell out so easily, why the Bath Festival isn’t reinstating its chorus? I can think of several reasons:

  • Bath Abbey is smaller than any of the 3 Choirs Cathedrals and can’t really accommodate a full-size orchestra. Wells Cathedral can, but it is some distance away and has become harder to hire in recent years
  • The concerts are expensive to put on, and may not make much profit even if they sell out
  • The 3 Choirs Festival has been running for over 300 years and has a dedicated body of supporters, many of whom go each year and buy up the tickets. I’m not sure the Bath Festival has anything like that sort of following
  • Choral music has always been at the heart of the 3 Choirs Festival (the clue’s in the name). The Festival Chorus has rather come and gone during the Bath Festival’s history
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Das Lied on Earth Day

Posted on April 26, 2016 by vhk10

How often do you get a performance of Das Lied von der Erde more or less at the end of your street? I found this was happening just in time and grabbed myself a ticket.

This was the Bath Philharmonia (or rather some of them, as they used the reduced orchestration by Glen Cortese for the Mahler) conducted by Jason Thornton and with Gavin Carr and Jonathan Stoughton as soloists in the Mahler. The concert was in memory of Gavin’s and Paul’s father, Martin, an avid supporter of the campaign for a proper purpose-built concert hall in Bath. (The latest relevant news is that it’s been found that the Southgate centre, where retail is king, is being used as a thoroughfare and people aren’t stopping to shop there. If it had had a destination venue within it, such as a concert hall, that might be different. I’ve also found out that this isn’t a recent campaign – a plan was proposed to build one south of the Abbey a century ago!)

The concert opened with Paul Carr’s Elegy for strings and Mozart’s Symphony no. 40. But the heart of it was the Mahler, which had the audience listening intently to a committed performance from all. If I single out some of the woodwind solos this is not to belittle the two vocal soloists.

I was in the gallery and had hoped to sit at the west end looking down the church, but it had been closed off for some sort of renovation – although it’s only a few years since the while church was renovated! So I was round the side peering around a pillar. I couldn’t always hear the tenor easily, but this may have been because of where I was sitting and/or the orchestration, as the brass in general came over strongly.

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Holy Week and Easter 2016

Posted on April 20, 2016 by vhk10

Coming soon after an extra licensing service for our new priest in charge, Holy Week was put together largely out of works already in our repertoire. I missed Maundy Thursday but otherwise was kept busy with Palm Sunday (Weelkes’ Hosanna to the Son of David and Philip Moore’s It is a thing most wonderful) and the music and readings service for Good Friday. The latter included eight choir items with lots of variety without requiring more than four parts, including Leighton’s Solus ad Victimam, Bruckner’s Christus Factus Est and the Crux Fidelis attributed to King John of Portugal. I had to break it to our conductor that the last of these is almost certainly 19th-century pastiche, so I’ve probably ruined it for him forever now. Choir members were invited to prepare solo items, and I contributed Thy rebuke/Behold and See from Messiah.

On Easter Sunday we brought out that old favourite Blessed be the God and Father by Wesley, a piece about half of us had performed at our weddings.

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Call me Al (2): Ahoy!

Posted on April 11, 2016 by vhk10

Another week, another cantata by Alexander l’Estrange. This time it was Ahoy! for the Mary Rose, performed in Colston Hall as part of Bristol Choral Society’s outreach programme. Choir members were joined by a large crew from several Bristol schools, so we stood on the stage near the band (slightly differently configured from last week, with an accordion). Everyone wore horizontal stripes.

The music is a mixture of sea shanties, other folk songs and Tudor songs, as well as an original arrangement of Full Fathom Five. The relatively simple harmonic structures allow some of these to run simultaneously. Singing Zimbe! caused me to miss a rehearsal, so extra concentration was needed. We also had a certain amount of movement on stage, not the aspect of choral performance I’m best at!

The children guaranteed us another large and appreciative audience, and it was a good way for me to end my BCS season, as I won’t be in the summer concert.

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the original Boris

Posted on April 8, 2016 by vhk10

We went to the cinecast of the ROH’s Boris Godunov. As I go to more of these, I realise there is a dedicated audience that I keep seeing at them, several of whom are known to me through other musical connections.

This production was stripped back to the first version of the opera. I don’t miss the Polish act particularly (it introduces a love interest that the opera doesn’t really need), but there is a loss in not having the final scene of confusion, and a lack of light relief when the landlady doesn’t sing the song about the duck!

The production itself went for realism with some costumes, but others were not of the period. I have to agree with the widespread criticism that it was rather static, and I’m not sure it was necessary to show Dmitri’s murder being repeatedly replayed; we’d got the message. Bryn Terfel really inhabited the title role and of the others I would single out Ain Anger as Pimen, conveying gentle humility, awe at the miraculous and a resolve that could make him stand up to the Tsar.

There are many great operas that give insight into the human condition as instanced in individuals, but I can’t think of any others that reveal a whole nation in the way this one does.

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Call me Al (1): my Assembly Rooms début

Posted on March 30, 2016 by vhk10

A couple of years ago I missed the chance to sing Zimbe! with Bristol Choral Society, as I was doing my bit for mixing musical culture across continents by singing Messiah in India. But it caught up with me, as my elder children’s school put it on and invited parents to join the chorus.

We were in the Assembly Rooms which was a first for me, as although I’ve been to many concerts there, I have never before performed there myself. Few amateur groups do, though I think Bath Minerva Choir did so a few years ago and Bath Baroque (when it existed) did too. The acoustic is as pleasantly clear from the stage as in the audience.

The composer, Alexander l’Estrange is a Mertonian, and I said hello. Zimbe! arranges songs from around Africa, almost all new to me, for forces including choir, semi-chorus, children’s chorus and jazz quintet. Some of the challenge of learning it is working out what to sing next, as there are numerous repeated passages. But the rewards are some ridiculously catchy tunes. Years ago I heard a news item about South African workers travelling from the townships to work by train, and how they passed the journey singing in harmony, and I tried to capture some of that spirit.

Our capacity audience gave us an enthusiastic reception, and our encore was a large chunk of the latter part of the piece. I’d like to think I made a good impression on our conductor [April: sadly this has proved to be a fleeting one as he has now left the school, so it was his farewell performance]. On to another cantata by the same composer a week later.

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The Bath Knot

Posted on March 26, 2016 by vhk10

Not a way of tying a dressing gown, but a branch of the The Ancient and Most Benevolent Order of Friendly Brothers of St. Patrick. They hold a service on the Tuesday nearest to St. Patrick’s Day and I was recruited to join the choir in the chapel of St John’s Hospital (an ancient foundation, now sheltered housing) where I’d never sung before. It was the first time in a while that I’d sung a service from a west gallery. It was good old traditional Church of England Mattins, with Anglican chants and, at the climax, St Patrick’s Breastplate (all verses) sung to the music of Thomas R. Gonsalvez Jozé. I’d never encountered this setting before, and it’s been generally supplanted by Stanford’s (or simplified versions of it), but it’s the one the Bath Knot always sings.

A variety of Orders like this exist quietly, for charitable reasons and as a source of social events (and a chance to wear regalia!) I encountered one at Winchester Cathedral a few years ago; a Roman Catholic organisation holding an unadvertised service in a side chapel and firmly all-male, in fact seeming to consist of the sort of man who finds any woman threatening. The Friendly Brothers of St. Patrick, however, include sisters, although from the sound of them I would guess few members had grown up in Ireland. Afterwards we all enjoyed some craic over wine and canapés.

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the Evangelist jinx

Posted on March 22, 2016 by vhk10

I wonder whether I should be allowed to sing the St Matthew Passion at all, given that I seem to bring illness with me when I perform it. The first time I did so, the Evangelist was unwell and his part had to be spoken. (This wasn’t a huge disaster as it was a ‘come and sing’ performance with organ.) The second time a member of the audience was taken ill and the interval was extended so that medical attention could reach them. This time our soprano and alto soloists were both replaced due to illness. Then the Evangelist, Rufus Müller, got food poisoning and only joined us late on in the final rehearsal. Our other three soloists were fortunately unscathed. I’ll single out the baritone soloist, Dominic Sedgwick, not so much for singing superbly (though he did), but because with a name like that we must share a distant ancestor somewhere along the line.

Actually I’ve done very little JS Bach for several years, apart from a motet a few years ago. This was also the first time I’d sung this work in German. It had been a busy day for me, beginning with an installation service for our new priest-in-charge including among other things two meaty descants and Bruckner’s Christus factus est. After this and a rapid journey by foot and train from Bath to Colston Hall, I needed to keep something in reserve for the concert. For some of the venom necessary in the turba parts, I drew on the description of the crowd in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, which I’d read earlier that week.

Our orchestra was Music for Awhile, who brought a fine array of baroque instruments with them; I was at the front, just behind the harpsichord and with a good view of the other instruments. As well as the more common oboi d’amore, there were two oboi da caccia. I don’t think I’d even seen an oboe da caccia before, let alone taken part in a performance with one!

I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to compare this performance directly to the Bath Abbey one. There was something to be said for each of them; the Chorus Angelorum one had the English Chamber Orchestra, a team of big-name soloists, and a small individually selected chorus. The BCS one was in German and had the authentic instruments and the extra power and weight you get from a large chorus.

I’ll end by expressing the hope that I get to do the St John Passion again before too long [I did – the following year]. I have sung this only once, when I was a student. I think that if the St Matthew Passion didn’t exist we’d really recognise the greatness of the St John. I love the angst in its chromatic chorale harmonisations – and for me it has one of the greatest endings of any musical work.

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Baroque pitch

Posted on March 22, 2016 by vhk10

Our performance of the St Matthew Passion was at ‘baroque pitch’ i.e. a semitone low. I found this hard to get used to, and have been trying to work out why, given that in 2012 and 2013 I performed Messiah at baroque pitch without being at all bothered. Apart from that almost everything I’ve sung recently has been at A=440.

Is it that I am more familiar with the Messiah, use the score less (and in performance not at all), so there is no ‘travel sickness’ from seeing notes that aren’t the ones I’m singing? Was it because that I learned the Passion a few years ago in a very physically engaged way, and so there is a physical memory of what the notes feel like? Is it because I’ve done more performances of the Handel at baroque pitch (although I struggle to think which of the 20-odd I’ve sung these would have been)? Or has my sense of pitch got keener in the last couple of years (there’s some evidence for this)?

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rejecting the proof reader

Posted on March 9, 2016 by vhk10

Last year I was approached by a proof reader offering me their services (assisted by a special app which speeded up the process). As a sample of what they and their app could do, they pointed out a couple of errors which they believed they’d found.

Now I think this service could genuinely be useful to people who have great difficulty writing accurate English, and on sites where accuracy really matters, so I don’t wish to disparage it. I’m willing to pass on details of this proof-reader on request. But their services aren’t needed here. Here is my reply (which went unanswered!):

    Dear [proof reader],

    Thank you for pointing out typos found by your app on my web site, (www.virginiaknight.org.uk/vhkssinging) and for offering your services as a proof reader.

    Arrangments was indeed a typo, and I’ve corrected it. But hostes is correct. It’s part of a Latin sentence meaning ‘Lord, how many are my enemies’, and the title of a stunningly beautiful and dramatic anthem by Purcell (as it’s a title, I italicised it). As someone with a PhD in Classics I am very unlikely to make mistakes when quoting Latin (which my blog frequently does, because much of the music I sing is in Latin).

    My blog is written for the entertainment of myself and others, rather than for profit, and my regular readers are willing to tolerate a few mistakes along the way. I frequently revisit what I wrote and correct or amend it at a later date – I’m currently doing this in conjunction with adding tags to the entries. So I don’t think I will take advantage of your offer, but pass on the message to others.

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