three recordings of the St Matthew Passion

Posted on March 8, 2016 by vhk10

I’ve been preparing for a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, the first I’ve sung in for nearly ten years, and only the third I’ve ever been involved in. I know the notes of my part thoroughly as they were drilled firmly in last time, but there are major differences in the forthcoming performance. Firstly, I have a very physical memory of where the notes are at modern pitch, but this performance will be at baroque pitch. Secondly, it’s auf Deutsch.

We have three recordings of this work. Firstly, the venerable Klemperer one on LP. This was one of the few LPs I did not transfer to CD, as I couldn’t imagine myself setting aside the 4 hours to listen to it. The memorable moment is perhaps when Peter Pears sings of Peter’s reaction to hearing the cock crow, and it sounds just like Britten.

On hearing of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s death last weekend, I whipped out our recording of him conducting the Passion (the later of the two recordings) and played it. This was helpful, although I have some reservations; the chorus don’t always sound very involved or (in the crowd scenes) nasty. And while their choral ensemble in Sehet, Jesus hat die Hand is fine, it isn’t keeping the same time as the rest of the performers. Bernarda Fink is just too histrionic for me.

Our third recording is by John Butt and the Dunedin Consort. I have memories of singing for John while at Cambridge (if you’ve been conducted by him, you tend to remember it) but haven’t listened to this recording for a while so don’t want to risk comparing it to Harnoncourt here and now.

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the Scottish opera

Posted on March 7, 2016 by vhk10

I went to Bath Opera again to see Macbeth, encouraged by a friend in the chorus. As last year, I left it to the last minute but they hadn’t sold out, so I was sold a seat in a block tucked between the main part of the stage and a catwalk-like projection down the middle of the auditorium. Although these seats hadn’t sold in large numbers in advance, several people who liked their opera in the round moved down into them at the interval. (Those in them also got their own personal bow from the cast.)

The programme didn’t say which version of Macbeth we were getting, but it was the later revision, shorn of various bits of dance music. Bravo to all performers and others involved!

Shakespeare’s play was a school set text for me (twice) and so remained in my mind throughout as a point of comparison. Lady M in Verdi’s version is rather more of a sensualist (I can’t imagine Shakespeare’s leading the company in a drinking song). Small groups of people (Banquo’s murderers, the witches) get expanded into a chorus. Famous speeches survive in attenuated form (‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ is represented just by its last couple of lines). And as well as Shakespeare’s play one senses bel canto opera being transformed into something new.

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the sun but not the moon

Posted on February 24, 2016 by vhk10

For the first time in ages I went to evensong at Bath Abbey, sung by a visiting choir in residence for the weekend, in this case the University of Bristol Church Choir. They proved to be one of the better such choirs I’ve heard at the Abbey, with nice tone, balance and tuning. I felt they could have afforded to be more ambitious in their choice of music and the quality of performance would not have suffered. It was also good to see a (clergy) friend in the congregation, so I could sit with someone who was participating fully. But there were three things that stopped this service from being an uplifting occasion.

Firstly, it was sad only to be given 8 verses of Ps. 136 for the psalmody. Why could this more than competent choir not have sung the whole psalm? It’s not particularly long and the rest of it doesn’t say anything nasty. As it was, it stopped abruptly, so much so that God was praised for creating the sun, but never got round to the moon or the stars. Evensong just isn’t evensong if there’s only a handful of verses from an abridged psalm. It’s patronising to the congregation to assume that people can’t handle listening to 20-odd verses of Anglican chant, and the psalms are complete poems and should be treated as such (OK, apart from 119).

I also winced when the hymn was announced. I’d been expecting a seasonal hymn, suitable for the first week of Lent, but we got The day Thou gavest. I hope we haven’t returned to the days when this hymn was relentlessly sung at Saturday evensong at Bath Abbey throughout the liturgical year, without thought for the regular worshippers at this service (there are some). My patience with it ran out long ago as a result.

Finally – I suspect this was not intentional, but the continuous video showcasing the Abbey’s activities in the North transept wasn’t turned off during the service, even though there was no one there to watch it. It was distracting to have it flickering at the edge of my vision, although I managed to shift slightly so that someone in the pew in front blocked my view of it.

I have the impression that the service music for these Saturday evensongs is carefully planned, and the psalmody and hymnody neglected. But they are all part of the act of worship and should be chosen with the same care as the rest of the music.

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Bath loses a music shop – again

Posted on February 19, 2016 by vhk10

After a little over three years, Music Dynamics in Broad St has closed, as the parent company has gone into administration. I didn’t find it quite as useful as it ought to have been. As with its predecessor, Duck Son & Pinker, the staff weren’t thoroughly familiar with their field – as I found out when I asked about a Flanders & Swann songbook and was asked ‘Who is it by?’ And ordering music was very laborious; it took a week to arrive and when I called in to collect it the staff couldn’t find it. For music costing over £10, Blackwell’s will waive postage costs and get it to you in a couple of days.

At the time the shop opened, there was an instrument shop, Sounds International, in Monmouth Place, but Bath couldn’t really support two of them, so it closed a couple of years ago. Now there aren’t any.

[July 2016] Sharps and Flats, which was mostly a gift shop but did stock a limited range of sheet music, has now closed so Bath is now without a music shop of any kind.

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The Sea Symphony (2): Cardiff

Posted on February 17, 2016 by vhk10

Our third performance of the Sea Symphony was at St David’s Hall in Cardiff. I hope our diction came over well because the audience (who’d chosen us in preference to Ireland v Wales in the rugby) weren’t able to get programmes. Here are some thoughts on the actual music.

The programme was the same for each of the three concerts. Firstly the Wasps overture, composed for a performance of Aristophanes’ play in Cambridge. I’ve been to a few Cambridge Greek plays, and while the incidental music for them has usually done the job, the days when a major composer might write it are long gone. Did the Classical Drama Society use up a large chunk of their budget commissioning a score from VW? Or was this particular play very lavishly funded? Or did Vaughan Williams charge students a reduced fee? I do wonder whether the overture was already written or thought out, and when the commission arrived the ‘buzzing’ introduction was added, because the overture’s wasps are much less persistent than real ones and you don’t hear them afterwards.

Mark van de Wiel was the in-house soloist in Finzi’s Clarinet Concerto with the Philharmonia string section. I didn’t know this piece and like much of Finzi it had considerably more drama and darkness than he’s usually given credit for, at least in the first two movements. I’m not sure whether I was meant to think this, but some of the strings-only passages reminded me of Shostakovich!

Having got to know it, I still have rather mixed feelings about the Sea Symphony. The second movement is sublime, with a grand summing up near the end (I was reminded of Vaughan Williams’ anthem Lord, Thou hast been our refuge). But I find the first and last movements a bit diffuse. Maybe the problem is that I’m very unfamiliar with Vaughan Williams’ orchestral works and haven’t worked out yet how to listen to them. I was one of the semi-chorus (which sang two phrases in the 4th movement) in the Cardiff and Basingstoke performances (what was it with VW and groups of 16 singers?).

Review of the Cardiff performance

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The Sea Symphony (1): Basingstoke and London

Posted on January 31, 2016 by vhk10

The first two of Bristol (+ Gloucester) Choral Society’s three outings with the Philharmonia Orchestra, John Wilson and the Sea Symphony were to the Anvil, Basingstoke, and to the Royal Festival Hall, where we were joined by Philharmonia Voices. I’ll put thoughts on the programme itself in another article after the last performance, in Cardiff.

The Anvil had not been built when I was growing up a few miles away. It’s named because of its pointy shape (on the outside), which also resembles the prow of a ship, so appropriate to this programme. Inside, the ovoid shape and reddish walls of the hall give it a rather womb-like feel. It has the disadvantage that there doesn’t appear to be anywhere sensible to eat very near by; I believe such places do exist in Basingstoke but they are right over the other side of the town centre.

We spent the night at the Thistle Hotel at Heathrow. Given the timings, this really was just a bed for the night and breakfast in the morning, the latter being enlivened by a panoramic view of my parents’ former workplace.

We had plenty of time to listen to the Philharmonia in rehearsal, much of which I spent admiring the beautiful matching pair of harps. Later got into a Twitter conversation with one of the harpists (learning that the Sea Symphony has a fiendish harp part); as orchestral musicians go, harpists seem to be among the chattier ones (is it because they get a bit lonely with all the extra time on stage tuning up?)

There were several reviews, though none in the morning papers, which review far fewer individual concerts than they did even a few years ago:

Anvil:
The Classical Source

RFH:
Bachtrack
The Arts Desk
The Classical Source
Evening Standard

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Complicated things with jabots

Posted on January 30, 2016 by vhk10

Not being sure about my future with Priory Voices, I have been looking at other similar choirs and joined one, the Harsnett Choir, for a weekend of services in Wells. I’d been on their mailing list for a few years and shown an interest in one or two of their other Cathedral visits, but their numbers are strictly controlled (I was only able to take part because one of the usual sopranos volunteered to sing alto) and this was my first time actually singing with them. This weekend was, I think, the fourth time in my life I’ve worn a surplice and this is one of the choirs that does complicated things with jabots.

There were some pieces which were new to me. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid singing Stanford’s Te Deum and Jubilate in C. Not just because Matins is rare these days, as I probably sing it a couple of times a year at least and I’d have expected to have encountered this setting by now. We sang all of Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus (I hadn’t realised there was more of it than just the first part). I hadn’t previously come across a Mass setting by Healey Willan, which I’d guess was one of his early works (incidentally, are there any other church music composers with a public park named after them?). We sang a Magnificat on the Fifth tone by Cima; for a truly bizarre YouTube video of this piece see here. There were also a couple of pieces written specifically for this choir.

I didn’t sing in Wells last year and took time to notice that it has a good line in three-dimensional altar frontals.

I wasn’t in the best of voice – I’d had a cough in the New Year and it was brought on again by spending several hours in the rehearsal room with all the windows open – but managed to complete the weekend without any mishaps.

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You know you’ve just sung the Sea Symphony when…

Posted on January 25, 2016 by vhk10

… you cannot see the ‘Following’ button on Twitter without hearing the end of the Scherzo.

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♥ Olga and Onegin are now friends

Posted on January 21, 2016 by vhk10

Wouldn’t the plot of Eugene Onegin work well as a series of status updates? We went to see it at the Royal Opera House.

This particular production was on its second outing here and had apparently been toned down a bit. The main conceit was that Tatyana and Onegin were looking retrospectively back on the action and so at some critical moments their roles were doubled by dancers. This didn’t really work for me – I just didn’t want an additional person on stage in the letter scene (for example) – although I think it might have worked in a production which didn’t attempt to be true to the time and place in which it was set.

Another area where literalism broke down was the treatment of the chorus, and I sensed an uncertainty about what to do with them, as they tended to be pushed towards the back of the stage. In the opening scene they laid hands on some of the principal characters – one could imagine their descendants throwing over the old order in the revolution a few decades later – but then they reappeared, still in rather drab monochrome, at Tatyana’s name-day ball. Surely the guests, even in the provinces, would have been rather more brightly dressed?

We had hoped to hear Hvorostovsky in the title role, but medical treatment necessitated his replacement by the Polish baritone Artur Ruciński, looking rather like a younger version of Lech Wałęsa. Somehow I couldn’t imagine a lovesick teenager falling for him – a really great singer would transcend this, but his performance, though adequate, wasn’t at that level. We were happy with Nicole Car (Tatyana) and Oksana Volkova (Olga); however Michael Fabiano as Lensky stole the show. We’ve enjoyed Ferruccio Furlanetto (Gremin) in the past but felt his intonation was a bit dodgy this time.

Semyon Bychkov – last heard conducting Shostakovich – did a good job in the pit. It’s pretty hard to mess up this opera, and it,was certainly worth the effort of the trip to London. There are reviews online, though not of the cast we heard.

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On the German border

Posted on January 15, 2016 by vhk10

I made two overseas trips in December, both near the border of Germany. First a short break in Aachen. The Cathedral there had a handsome organ, though its unique shape may give it some acoustic peculiarities (I didn’t hear the organ played so couldn’t verify this). One of the advertised concerts was going to be given by the choir of Trinity College Cambridge, who had also discovered that it’s not that far to go.

Christmas itself was spent near Colmar. Most of the musical content came from odd bits of France Musique on the car radio (their equivalent of the BBC Singers sounds very similar to them). I went to Midnight Mass – which really did start at midnight – and we sang a couple of familiar French carols and paid tribute to the area’s mixed history with a strangely-accented rendering of Stille Nacht.

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2015 and 2016’s resolutions

Posted on December 31, 2015 by vhk10

As 2015 ebbs away, I look back on it as a year of progress rather than achievement. It couldn’t really match up to 2014 but there were some wishlist works that I got to perform: Poulenc’s Gloria (twice in a fortnight with different choirs!), Frank Martin’s Mass (or most of it), and Gowers’ Viri Galilæi. Other notable performances included Mahler 8 (albeit in a different place and with a different conductor from the ones I’d planned) and Verdi’s Requiem (for personal reasons). Venues included Worcester Cathedral, Canterbury Cathedral, York Minster, St George’s Windsor and a return after a long time to St Edmundsbury Cathedral. I’ve been happy with the standard of my own performance in all of these. On the concert and opera-going front it was rather quiet, the highlight being Igor Levit at the Wigmore Hall.

I started doing occasional solos in the church choir (and have done several during the year) as well as a couple with the Cathedral Chamber Choir. Against this must be set the possible loss of Priory Voices – I sang a weekend with them and saved dates of a couple of weekends in 2016, but that wasn’t enough to keep me on the list.

Musically speaking, 2016 is going to be dominated by participating in the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester. I’d been keen to take part in this at some point, and for various reasons this seemed obviously the right year to do it. It will mean sacrificing some regular engagements such as the Erleigh Cantors in July. It will mean an awful lot of new notes, strenuous physical demands and a great deal of travelling to and fro. Watch this space.

Other planned singing includes weekends in Wells (very soon), Cambridge, and, erm, Gloucester, and a tour in Lichfield, as well as my first encounters with the Sea Symphony and Belshazzar’s Feast. Bristol Choral Society gains a new musical director, though I don’t think I’ll get to sing in a concert they conduct until the end of the year. Around me there are changes as at least two Bath choirs will also change their MD.

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BCS … with bling

Posted on December 31, 2015 by vhk10

I missed Bristol Choral Society’s Messiah last year, so my memory needed a bit of refreshing this time. Our orchestra was the Bristol Ensemble, which meant modern pitch, and the high notes went with a bit more zing. We had a lot of competing Messiahs (I knew of three performances in Bath and another one in Bristol in the month before ours), but there were plenty to perform to, both at the Mini Messiah family concert, and the main performance in the evening.

It was a slightly poignant occasion, as it was the last performance under our current Musical Director. When singing from memory it is such a help to have your entries clearly brought in with a glance in your direction, and he is able to do this even for simultaneous entries for sopranos and altos, who stand at opposite ends of the choir for this work!

However, there was some light relief as our jewellery rule was relaxed and we were encouraged to wear ‘a splash of red’ somewhere on our person. Normally we can’t wear anything which might reflect the light, which rules out just about all the jewellery I own. (I wear a pair of earrings with dark stones, and for Requiems a string of antique jet beads.) So out came the crocheted spherical earrings.

I’ll end with a couple of thoughts. The audience of course stood up for the Hallelujah Chorus, and something about the way they always do this in a rather ragged way on cue makes me think of the ‘teddy bear toss’ at Christmas ice hockey matches. And we were told that ‘His yoke is easy’ (which one conductor always called ‘His yoke is blooming difficult’) is the hardest chorus in the piece. Is it? I don’t think I find any chorus harder than all the others, though there are some which are definitely easier than most. Or are the difficulties not to be found in the soprano line?

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