Coned off

Posted on March 13, 2015 by vhk10

I’d never been to a performance by Bath Opera although various people I know have been involved with the company. But when they put on Peter Grimes (an opera that they also staged some 20 years ago) I felt I had to go.

The 3 performances sold out, and as well as the regular following of Bath Opera had clearly drawn an audience from some distance (apparently across the Severn in some cases). I arrived on spec and for the first half sat in a spare fire-warden’s seat with the double bass and harp between me and the stage (the latter instrument having a large part to play in this work). For the second half I had an unobscured view from a seat that was confirmed as vacant.

I had never been to a live performance and I appreciated much that I hadn’t noticed before, such as the way that the music of the sea interludes generates much of the material for the scenes which follow them. The highlight for me was the quartet for Auntie, the Nieces (all the ‘respectable’ people having gone off to organise persecution of Grimes) and Ellen; I’d not thought of Britten as a composer of female solidarity before.

This opera affords chorus parts for all ages, and if they were occasionally slightly ragged, this only added versimilitude. The acting was convincing throughout The performance was fitted into a school theatre and the soloists sang over the orchestra (conducted by Peter Blackwood) in the confined space with varying degrees of success: Bulstrode (Niall Hoskin) achieving this best. Rupert Drury and Julia O’Connor were the leads.

The sets were straightforward, with the sea suggested by video projected on to the back of the stage. Just after the embroidery aria, this came unstuck and behind Ellen and Bulstrode there briefly appeared not waves, but a Windows desktop with a large image of a traffic cone (the logo of the DVD software). It says much for the performance that this did not diminish its impact.

Review

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

What is it about Hereford Cathedral?

Posted on March 9, 2015 by vhk10

The lead time for booking a visiting choir at a Cathedral gets ever longer. I have been sorting out a week for August 2018 and have booked one of a couple of available weeks in Winchester. A couple of other major ancient Cathedrals had just one week left. But Hereford is booked up and we have to wait for 2019 to try to go there. (After an attempt to book them in 2016 we were told we would be contacted when 2017 booking opened, but we never were).

Part of the reason is that the 3 Choirs Festival will be held in Hereford in 2018, which reduces available time for visiting choirs by a week, but it always seems to book up earlier than other comparable Cathedrals. The Willis organ was in great demand by organists after a rebuild, but that was a decade ago. Any other suggestions why Hereford is more popular than, say, Salisbury or Durham? Is it the cider?

[August 2015: I have a partial answer. They like inviting back choirs whose visits have gone well. One such choir (which I have sung with) sang there 12 years ago and has been offered two summer weeks since then, without needing to request them. Once these choirs have been accommodated, there are few weeks left over for anyone else.]

Posted in booking visiting choirs | Tagged | Leave a comment

A chorister watches The Theory of Everything

Posted on March 8, 2015 by vhk10

It’s a strange experience to watch a bio-pic of someone who used to have the singing lesson after yours. Members of Stephen Hawking’s family crossed my path in various ways when I was in Cambridge. I don’t think I ever sang in a choir with his wife Jane, but we shared a singing teacher.

In one scene she joins her church choir. Often scenes of music making in films are very inaccurate, particularly church music (anyone remember the village church with a full-scale Cathedral choir and acoustic in A Room with a View?) This one had singers of the right sort of standard singing plausible music (Mozart’s Ave Verum, rather curiously abridged) in a typical-looking parish church (though interior and exterior shots didn’t match). What amused me most about this scene was that Mrs Hawking was told (without having been auditioned) ‘You will be a valuable asset’. Exactly the same words as said to me when I was last auditioned (although I don’t think I was described as ‘valuable’!)

Posted in category-defying | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The Down Gin service

Posted on February 22, 2015 by vhk10

I joined the choir of St. Peter’s Caversham to sing an evensong at Bristol Cathedral. Most of the music was familiar (Clucas responses, with his rather less familiar Lord’s Prayer, Bainton, Bairstow), but the canticles were new to me: Bob Chilcott’s Downing Service. The existence of this service illustrates the greater attention paid recently to choral music in Colleges which previously had not gone in for it very much. Downing would never have commissioned a canticle setting from a major composer in the 1980’s, for example. I’d guess Chilcott’s service was linked to the major rebuild of the Chapel organ a few years ago. It is harmonically very simple but rhythmically complex with frequent changes of time signature.

We were made welcome by Bristol and given tea in the Chapter House (with flapjacks!) before the service.

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

Toward the Unknown Region

Posted on February 17, 2015 by vhk10

This piece was only a name to me until I signed up for Bristol Choral Society’s Come and Sing, which this year featured the music of Vaughan Williams. It’s a ‘song’ for choir in a genre which has now gone out of fashion: a setting of a poem for chorus and orchestra lasting about 10 minutes. (Blest Pair of Sirens. which you also don’t hear very much these days, is another example.) It’s an early work, mixing some rather four-square material with more harmonically daring passages.

Over 200 of us gathered at Tyndale Baptist Church, a handsome building notable for its stained glass windows (it’s a pity though that the lovely central east window can no longer be illuminated by natural light). Our other piece was the Mass in G minor. I’ve sung most possible bits of this over the years: first and second soprano parts, and most of the solos. But I’m not very familiar with the second soprano line and I don’t think I’d ever sung the Creed, so I had some learning to do even in this much more familiar work.

At the end of the day we sang through both pieces with the piano impersonating the orchestra in Toward the Unknown Region and discreetly accompanying in the Mass (to avoid the loss of pitch which Vaughan Williams clearly anticipated to judge by his comments in the score).

We were told that Vaughan Williams has been a bit out of fashion recently, which may partly explain why there are many important choral works by him that I’ve never sung: the Sea Symphony (this may change soon, though), Hodie, Dona Nobis Pacem, Sancta Civitas, the Oxford Elegy and, astonishingly, his Fantasia on Christmas Carols. [2020 update: I’ve now done the symphony, Dona Nobis Pacem and the Fantasia.

Posted in singing - other | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The wheel turns again?

Posted on February 8, 2015 by vhk10

Back in the early years of the millennium, there was a shortage of choral singers in Bristol, with choirs all fishing in the same limited pool. After some defections and outright poaching, the Brandon Hill Singers could not recruit new members in order to stay viable. A few years later the situation was very different. I enquired about one of the large choirs in the city, and was put on a ‘waiting list’ for auditions – I never heard from that choir again. I heard from another source around that time that all the city’s choirs had such waiting lists.

In 2012 I joined Bristol Choral Society by means of what I understand is the standard procedure – I came to a few rehearsals, and then auditioned. I spoke recently to a member of that other choir with the waiting list, who told me that their choir did indeed once make people wait years on end for an audition, but after a change of membership secretary they now audition all prospective singers quickly.

I sense there’s been another change in Bristol’s choral culture. Here are some possibilities:

  • We may be back where we were a dozen years ago, where singers are a scarce resource that choirs compete for. Some choirs have appeared or expanded recently, so this is quite plausible. [2016 – Bristol Cathedral Concert choir appears to have been the victim and gone under this time.]
  • It’s been realised that waiting lists for auditions are, in my words, ‘miserable alternatives to singing’ and so they have been abolished out of courtesy to prospective singers. I’d like to think this was the case, though realistically I have to doubt it
  • It’s been realised that by putting people off unheard, choirs may damage themselves by losing good singers who will be recruited by their rivals
  • There hasn’t been an overall change at all; I just had the misfortune to encounter a tidy-minded membership secretary who didn’t wish to deviate from a set quota of singers in each voice (but who didn’t bother to contact those on the waiting list when a vacancy appeared)
  • Choirs are now more relaxed about numbers of singers because as audiences shrink they need the income from subscriptions. A cynical view perhaps, but at least one choir round here has been known quietly to drop singers while continuing to collect their subscriptions by direct debit, because the money is useful even if the voice isn’t.

Comments?

Posted in choirs | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

an extraordinary corset

Posted on February 8, 2015 by vhk10

Cinecasts of opera performances are popular these days, but I’ve never been to one until last week, when we went to Andrea Chénier, beamed from the Royal Opera House to our local Odeon. I admit to having a soft spot for this particular opera, despite not being a verismo enthusiast. It may take a bit of time to get going, and there is a rather bewildering cast of characters who come and go (Bersi in particular could have been made more of – she disappears after Act II), but that ending! And you have to love an opera which contains the line (in the translation in our recording) ‘Your corset is truly extraordinary!’

Actually we heard about corsets in rather more detail in one of the interval features, where they interviewed members of the cast. I don’t really like this, as I’d rather still think of these people in character. However Antonio Pappano (speaking before the performance began) contributed some useful insights.

To really make this opera work, you have to have outstanding singers, and all the principals delivered the goods, especially Jonas Kaufmann in the title role. The production was a lavish one and very faithful to the period, except what was that green liquid in L’Incredibile’s glass in Act II meant to be? Surely not absinthe, which had only very recently been invented, or crème de menthe, whose heyday was the early 20th century; neither would have been the tipple of choice of a French Revolutionary spy.

Opera performances transfer quite well to cinema, once you get used to the close-ups of people singing at full blast (quite good for studying technique, though), and the necessary confines of the stage. The fashion for ‘filmed opera’, in real locations and with the singers miming to a soundtrack of their own performances, seems to have died out a while back. But cinecasts are cheaper to make and can therefore be rolled out in greater numbers.

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

a sad visit to Cambridge

Posted on February 1, 2015 by vhk10

I am not yet at the age where one regularly attends funerals of friends who were no older than oneself, but one such occasion took me to Cambridge early in the New Year. I had once been a member of the choir at the church where it took place, and since those days the musical establishment at the church has (contrary to the common pattern) expanded and been invested in. We sang some favourite pieces of my late friend, ending with the hymn tune Coe Fen; where more appropriate to sing it than a couple of minutes’ walk from Coe Fen itself? And I learnt that we had shared a love of Franck’s Chorale in A minor, the closing voluntary. Not that any of this afforded very much consolation.

Singing at very emotional occasions (and I have done a few, including funerals of children and young people) is always potentially fraught. I would still rather be in the choir at such times, as its liturgical role gives something to focus on.

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

retaining the tonality of A

Posted on January 20, 2015 by vhk10

I can’t actually remember which tonality we had to retain during the Gospel reading at Worcester Cathedral, but our musicianship was tested by having to remember the note needed for the response afterwards.

For the third time in my last four Cathedral visits we (in this case the Cathedral Chamber Choir) couldn’t use the Cathedral’s own song room, though in this case the Cathedral choir couldn’t either. The rather lovely Cathedral song room at Worcester was being refurbished, so a section of the cloister was partitioned off and equipped with heaters. At least the weather was relatively mild during our visit.

Saturday’s evensong had some personal favourites – Poulenc’s Videntes Stellam and Gibbons’ Second Service (in which I sang the 2nd soprano verse part); the Gibbons remains my favourite canticle setting. On the Sunday our Mass setting was Victoria’s on O magnum mysterium, which I’ve done a number of times over the years. Our setting in the evening was Bairstow’s in D, which I’ve only ever sung with this choir. We picked some Epiphany anthems (slightly jumping the gun as the Cathedral didn’t transfer Epiphany to the Sunday): Here is the little door by Howells and When Jesus our Lord/There shall a star by Mendelssohn.

We raised a large choir for this weekend; the time after Christmas is surprisingly popular, perhaps because people feel a need to do something active. I was struggling a bit with the remains of a cold I’d had a week earlier. Although I’ve sung at Worcester before, I’d never before left it by train on a Sunday; the experience is not recommended as trains are infrequent and there’s nowhere sensible to wait at Foregate St.

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

Bath loses a CD shop

Posted on January 19, 2015 by vhk10

Bath Compact Discs – which regularly featured on lists of the type ‘The Best Little Shops in Bath’ – has now closed. The website is still going (although the directions to the shop are still there as I write this) and business continues online, but after a big sell-off in December (in which I picked up some recordings I’m very glad to have) the former premises in Broad Street await another occupant.

It’s a standard comment on such events to lament high business rates and competition from the internet, and to regret that one cannot now serendipitously find interesting CDs by browsing through a physical rack. But there are so many more things about the shop that I miss:

  • the flyers and posters for local events (admittedly the posters came and went. At one point they used to fall off the wall and set off the burglar alarm). And with this the advertising opportunity for one’s own concerts
  • the information about new releases put out by record companies and left on display
  • the possibility of bumping into music-loving friends, or just striking up a conversation with a fellow music-lover over a rack of CDs
  • trying to identify the music playing as you came in
  • comparing reviews in the published CD review guides. Yes, you can do something similar on the internet but it’s not as easy
  • the knowledgeable staff
  • teaching children about repertoire by showing them the names of composers on the racks. One of mine liked going through the composers one by one: ‘Delius – isn’t he the one you don’t like?’
Posted in recordings | Tagged | Leave a comment

New programmers for the Bath Festival

Posted on January 16, 2015 by vhk10

An announcement has been made about the appointment of two ‘programmers’ for the Bath International Music Festival this year. The only place I can find it is at ‘Listomania Bath’ here; rather surprisingly there is nothing in the Bath Chronicle or even on the Bath Festivals website. A reference to the appointment was, however, buried in the ‘further particulars’ of a Festival-related job, where it was described as a ‘one year interim arrangement’.

The two people appointed are described as ‘programmers’ rather than ‘artistic directors’, which suggests that they are going to draw up the programme of concerts, but perhaps not determine any overall theme of the Festival. (The job particulars are more circumspect and talk about one of them ‘support[ing] … artistic planning’, which really doesn’t make it clear who actually calls the shots.) James Waters, like the outgoing artistic director Alasdair Nicolson, comes from Scotland, and is the programmer for classical music. Another programmer, David Jones, is in charge of jazz.

I’m not a jazz fan, but I’m aware that at times those who are round here have been rather short-changed, and so I welcome this development. We lost a local champion of jazz when Miles Kington died a few years ago, and Broad Street Jazz shut down last month (along with Bath Compact Discs).

I shan’t make any other comments at this stage, but simply refer to my open letter of three years ago. Almost everything in it still applies.

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

Turkish marches and children’s toys

Posted on January 16, 2015 by vhk10

Central Europe fought the Turk but appropriated some of his music in the form of the ‘Turkish march’. Some famous examples of this have enjoyed a fresh outing by being played on electronic gadgets of one sort or another. Beethoven’s march from The Ruins of Athens is a favourite demo tune on keyboards, for example. And at Christmas we were given a hand-held game (the idea is to join up pieces to form an electrical circuit) which plays Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca from the piano sonata K331 when the circuit is complete.

What is it about Turkish marches that lends itself to this sort of treatment? It must be the rather jingly, abrupt style, deriving from the percussion-heavy janissary bands that inspired them, that transfers well to electronic reproduction.

Posted in children | Tagged , | Leave a comment