owning the notes

Posted on May 23, 2016 by vhk10

I am now finding out just how well I know (or don’t) the Three Choirs pieces, and so how much work I need to do on them. The pieces for the six main concerts divide neatly into three pairs in this respect. Firstly the Berlioz and Mahler, both of which I’ve performed within the last two years. (Not that this means they don’t need looking at too, especially as I’m performing both from editions I haven’t used before).

Then there are two pieces that are better known to those around me than they are to me. Carmina Burana seems to be falling into place, especially as most of the other singers have performed it very recently. Lots of repetition and unlike Vaughan Williams no sudden startling changes of key, in fact few changes of key of any kind. My fellow singers are also collectively familiar with Elijah. I have performed this once before, when I was a student (and so probably with little rehearsal) and I was quite unsure how much I’d remember. I had dim blurry memories of the piece, as if I were looking up at it from the bottom of a swimming pool; but when we sing it I am more confident than I expect, so it must have lodged in the memory to some extent.

Finally, two pieces that are new to most of the choir, including me. I obtained a copy of Dona Nobis Pacem earlier this year and started to learn it soon after performing the Sea Symphony, while Vaughan Williams was still in my system. I find it rather easier to learn than the symphony, perhaps because VW’s style had evolved in the meantime into one I was more familiar with from other pieces.

Where I come adrift though is The Kingdom. I tried to take part in a performance that never happened a few years ago, but it never got even to the rehearsal stage. I’ve been through the score, and it seemed straightforward and even a bit on the dull side, but I realise I’ve underestimated the piece. The tempo is very fluid and along with the notes you have to be prepared for frequent changes of speed. Clearly, as with the Vaughan Williams, Elgar’s style had moved on significantly since Gerontius.

Posted in repertoire | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

the work I’ve avoided to date

Posted on May 11, 2016 by vhk10

All my life I’ve managed to avoid singing Carmina Burana, but it was bound to catch up with me sooner or later, and that moment has now arrived. This is one of those pieces that polarises singers and audiences. What exactly is my problem with it?

Orff’s role in the Third Reich is never going to be easy to gloss over. If I read the accounts of his life correctly, he was unprincipled, selfish and dishonest. But if we only performed music by the morally noble, the repertoire would be a lot smaller. And while I’d like to think that if history repeated itself, and ‘degenerate’ scores were destroyed, they would have to come and tear the last copy of the Altenberglieder or Lyric Suite out of my hands, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have behaved the same way as Orff in his situation.

My real problem is more with the percussive and apparently unmelodic vocal lines and lack of thematic development. However, I am willing just this once to be open to persuasion that there are subtleties in the piece that I’ve missed. I’m not, after all, rehearsing just this piece for weeks on end; it comes as part of a package. And the ticket sales show that there are plenty of people out there who want to hear it. There’s something to be learned from actors, who are always enthusing about their latest project no matter whether it happens to be to their taste or not.

And there are some things to be said for Carmina Burana:

  • The rigid rhythms are an antidote to the very flexible tempi in The Kingdom
  • It’s one of the rare works with a choral top C for the sopranos – and one of the rarer ones that gives it to the whole section, not just the 1sts
  • The lyrics make it clear (as I suppose does the continued existence of the human race) that sex did not disappear after ancient times, only to re-emerge in 1963
  • It is apparently good background music for wine tastings
Posted in repertoire | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The adventure begins

Posted on May 9, 2016 by vhk10

At last – some eight months after I auditioned – the rehearsals for the Three Choirs Festival Chorus are starting. Easily the biggest single choral undertaking I’ve ever been involved in. I have cleared my diary, bashed as many notes as I can (and I have to learn an awful lot of them for the first time), pencilled in all the markings and am ready to go.

I’ll be reporting from time to time, but because I don’t report on how things are going overall, it will mostly start off by being about my experience of learning Dona Nobis Pacem, Carmina Burana, The Kingdom and Walton’s Festival Te Deum – and that of re-encountering Elijah after many years. Perhaps contrary to the experience of others in the choir, Mahler 8 and the Grande Messe des Morts will be light relief to me, as those are the pieces I already know.

Posted in choirs, festivals | Tagged | Leave a comment

Two funerals

Posted on May 9, 2016 by vhk10

I’ve recently been to a couple of funerals – one as an invited singer, one as a family friend.

The former was my first visit to Bath crematorium and its chapel overlooking farmland south of the city. The family wanted the mourners to be given a lead in Crimond (a hymn that is only ever sung at weddings and funerals in my experience). The other was a Roman Catholic Requiem Mass in a small and full church. The music was a mixture of plainchant Ordinary and Propers and the sort of hymns popular in evangelical churches in the 1980s or so – rather surprisingly, given the advanced age of the lady whose Requiem it was.

The Requiem Mass had a singer from the church to lead the congregation (and teach them plainchant by moving her hand up and down). In both cases I had to set my dynamic level correctly – loud enough so that those nearby who were less confident could latch on to it, but not so loud as to predominate.

Posted in funeral, singing at services | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Gibbons for the Gaudy

Posted on May 3, 2016 by vhk10

I went back for a Gaudy at my old Oxford College, Merton. It was the first Gaudy I’d been invited to for 9 years, and the first since the choral foundation was set up. A selection of choir members sang at a very well attended Evensong in Chapel, the music including Gibbons’ Short Service and his If ye be risen with Christ, the latter sung at the East end by the chamber organ.

I get some information about the choir via the Friends scheme, though communications (especially by email) have broken down a little recently. I was officially told about a broadcast by the choir only on the day it happened, and received an invitation to a recital four days after it had taken place! These were last October, and probably fell through the net because the post of verger was unoccupied during the Long Vacation so there was no one to send the message out.

I gather the new organ is proving popular for recordings, and indeed has just been used on one made by one of the other major Oxford choral foundations. Looking at the music lists, I notice also that the repertoire includes fewer 21st century pieces than it did a few years ago. I got a chance to congratulate the choir as I came across them eating their dinner in the Savile Room afterwards.

Posted in going to services | Tagged , | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in singing at services | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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!

Posted in choirs, singing at services | Tagged | Leave a comment

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
Posted in festivals | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in going to concerts | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in singing at services | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in singing in concerts | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

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.

Posted in broadcasts, going to operas | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment