Fitting in Prom 68

Posted on September 22, 2014 by vhk10

My family realised that time was running out for getting to a Prom this year and so some of them went to Prom 68, the Cleveland Orchestra with Franz Welser-Möst.

This concert wasn’t all that well attended (they had been worried about getting in) but proved to be well worth while. The Brahms (Academic Festival Overture and First Symphony) was well played though the interpretation didn’t take any risks (similar views are expressed in the reviews below).

Between them came a new piece Flûte en suite by Jörg Widmann, written for and played by Joshua Smith. This alluded to various other pieces of music in which the flute is prominent, finally settling for Bach. The family enjoyed it without finding it very substantial. ‘Not weird enough’ was my husband’s verdict.

Reviews:

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Ten favourite anthems

Posted on September 14, 2014 by vhk10

I’ve been invited to name my ten favourite anthems. Like most people I can’t come up with a definitive list, though I think half of the following would be on any list of mine. I have excluded liturgical settings, even if they get used as anthems.

Gibbons, O clap your hands. I believe this was written when he got an Oxford DMus. and he certainly deserved it on this showing.

Gesualdo, O vos omnes. Much of my favourite music is radical, and this piece would remain so even if I were to hear it after a day of listening to Second Viennese School.

Purcell Jehova, quam multi sunt hostes mei. There would be more Purcell if I’d allowed myself more than one piece per composer.

Blow, Salvator mundi. About as near as I can get to a second piece by Purcell!

Wesley, The Wilderness. A great Cathedral classic.

Parry, Hear my words, ye people. And another one. Does anyone do the opening of this with a semi-chorus as Parry requested?

Vaughan Williams, Lord, thou hast been our refuge. An almost Janáček-like sensitivity to the rhythms of the text. And that heart-stopping moment when the trumpet comes in (especially if it’s a real trumpet).

Poulenc, Videntes stellam. Some composers lost what was best about their music when they wrote for the Church. Poulenc found a voice that was Catholic and yet utterly his own.

Walton, Drop, drop, slow tears. Still can’t believe how young he was when he wrote this.

Finzi, Lo, the full, final sacrifice. A cult piece when I was a student.

I’m willing to reveal the pieces that didn’t quite make the cut, over a drink. Actually, relatively little church music makes me feel like falling to my knees, although I am about to perform one piece that does – Berlioz’ Requiem.

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Starry anthems in Gloucester

Posted on September 13, 2014 by vhk10

I joined the Cathedral Chamber Choir on and off for part of its week in Gloucester Cathedral. On the Tuesday we sang Jonathan Dove’s Seek him that maketh the seven stars. I’d guess that this isn’t in the repertoire of the Cathedral choir, because it made a great impression on a verger, who went off to find a recording on YouTube. Friday’s evensong was an early music one with Daniel Purcell’s canticles paired with Gibbons’ O Clap Your Hands, and an uncut Psalm 69: ‘Let his habitation be void’ and so on.

On Saturday things livened up a bit, as we sang at the wedding blessing of the Dean’s brother. Most of the music was standard wedding fare, but the couple requested an arrangement of Take That’s Rule the World (Stardust). This arrangement was musically quite complicated with descants etc., although the Cathedral organ was not the ideal accompanying instrument. At the end the guests applauded, which has never happened to me after an anthem before – but why not have a secular response to a secular piece? Anyway I can’t fault the taste of a couple who gave their son the same very unusual name as my elder boy. Later that afternoon we sobered up by singing Leighton’s First Service and Walton’s Set me as a seal (which was among my own choices of wedding music).

Gloucester now has a nave altar and choir stalls, so no need any more to sing Osannas directly into the ears of people walking past you on their way to and from communion. Our setting was new to me – Victoria’s Missa Simile est Regnum, sung from a combination of two editions in different keys.

Our final service was the Cathedral’s annual Royal British Legion service. I’m curious to know whether other Cathedrals have such a service, independently of Remembrance Sunday – I’ve never come across one before. It wasn’t specifically a service to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. We had a modified order of service with no chanted psalm (always the first thing to go) and extra hymns including the National Anthem and I vow to thee my country (I can count the occasions on which I’ve sung this hymn on the fingers of one hand). We were accordingly constrained in our choice of anthem and used Ireland’s Greater Love. I’ve sung Howells’ Gloucester canticles just about everywhere, but this was the chance to sing them in Gloucester. It is rather special to bring music to the place for which it was composed, but I imagine Cathedrals don’t encourage visiting choirs to do so, otherwise they’d get the same pieces all the time. At the end of the service we had a guard of honour in the cloisters.

(N.B. Visiting choirs at Gloucester need to think about how much space they might need. The rehearsal room in the visitors’ centre is not large, though this time they had made space by removing the tables – on previous visits the knees of Dec have touched the knees of Can when the choir sat down! We took care to book the Parliament Rooms, but the booking was quietly changed back to the visitors’ centre without our being consulted. So if you book the Parliament Rooms, keep checking that the booking stands before you come.)

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a super chorus for Bath?

Posted on September 9, 2014 by vhk10

I’ve just been reading a recent issue of Bath Life in which they interview Will Dawes, the director of music at Bath Choral Society. He expresses a wish to pull together various local choirs as a ‘super chorus’. ‘There are so many brilliant singers in the area, and sometimes it feels as though the groups are competing, when we could achieve something amazing by collaborating’.

Now there really was something a bit like this until about ten years ago – the Bath Festival Chorus. I wonder whether he knows about this bit of Bath’s musical history? Sadly I think that too much time has gone by to reconstitute the chorus with its membership as at 2005 (when it last performed), although I think many of those people are still around. Another concert which collected singers from all over was the performance of Mahler 8 in the 2000 Bath Festival. The difficulty with any such venture is the organisation – how are singers to be selected? when and where will they rehearse? what will the financial model be? who will keep track of contact details and ordering/distributing/collecting the music? and so on. Even a one-off concert would require a lot of work behind the scenes.

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Prom 44: Strauss, Elgar and Berlioz

Posted on September 5, 2014 by vhk10

I don’t think I’ve been in the Arena for a sell-out Prom before. I was sold my ticket with seconds to spare before I squeezed into the Arena. A popular programme, and I heard a fair few Australian accents in the audience for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis. As it happened this programme featured two composers I’m going to be performing in the autumn, so it was a good way to get into the mood.

Hard to avoid Richard Strauss completely this year, as he has the monopoly on major anniversaries. I have tried to minimise exposure, reasoning that if I ration the amount I will get about the right dosage. His Don Juan opened the concert, with a zippy performance. The Elgar Cello concerto, with Truls Mørk as soloist, was a complete contrast in mood. I don’t actually know it all that well, and I have to confess to preferring earlier Elgar to later (ducks hastily). This particular performance lacked a bit of momentum though and seemed to drag in places. As I heard the end of it, echoing the beginning, I wondered whether Elgar thought the Great War had achieved nothing (as my grandfather, who served in it, did).

I’ve managed never to go to a performance of the Symphonie Fantastique, despite being a Berlioz fan. This was a chance to put this right and this performance was again full of verve (like the Strauss, this piece records a lover’s eventful life story) and a nod to the peformance practice of the era in some portamento which you don’t usually hear. I gather some repeated passages were omitted though and I think I’m used to hearing them, particularly in the fourth movement.

The orchestra was more than up to the demands of the music, although I felt occasionally there was some shrill woodwind. The brass playing though was excellent, and the strings silky.

The encore was Percy Grainger’s Handel in the Strand. I had to suppress the thought that lots of percussion was used because Grainger liked being hit himself; the arrangement appears to be by someone else.

Reviews:

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Building an audience (1): building relationships

Posted on September 3, 2014 by vhk10

This is a perennial problem for choirs, never more so than in these times when choral singing is popular but audiences may have watch their outlay.

My comments here are really about the Bath choral scene, which I know about both as audience member and performer. Many audience members seem to be very loyal to one particular choir, attending their concerts rather than others. One such person could easily be worth £100 a year to a choir, if they come to all the concerts and bring another audience member with them each time. If choirs can create such relationships and work on them, the effort of fund-raising would be significantly reduced.

And yet I don’t see much effort put into building these relationships, beyond setting up a mailing list here and there. For example, if choir members mix with audiences in the interval, they could look out for people they recognise and chat to them. It was one choir’s failure to do this that caused me to leave one of their concerts and not go back to any further ones. It’s such a simple thing to get right.

An obvious constituency to target is people who once sang in the choir, but now don’t, together with people who have expressed an interest in joining but don’t as yet sing with the choir. There are ways of wooing such people, for example by having a larger-scale concert and inviting some of them to take part, as Bath Camerata used to do on Good Friday. They will then be more likely to come to other concerts. Another very simple thing to get right is dealing with those who ask for auditions; a waiting list for auditions should be just that and lead to an audition. Probably the Paragon Singers have lost several hundred pounds over the years because I’ve not been inclined to go to one of their concerts while I’m still on such a list!

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Did the Chantry Singers leave a gap?

Posted on September 2, 2014 by vhk10

I realise it’s a few years since the Chantry Singers disbanded. The choir was flourishing right to the end, but the founder and musical director felt she had achieved what she wanted with it, and sensed that the market was more crowded with other choirs competing for singers and audience. I sang with it on and off, though I wasn’t with it right at the end, having become discouraged by realising that I was one of their most dispensible singers. Nevertheless, I have fond memories of the concerts in the Abbey and of the people I got to know in the choir.

How to win and retain an audience is a matter which is sufficiently complex to merit a separate post. But I’m not really sure which other choirs were competing for the same singers. There were some larger choirs (and it was at this time that the Minerva Choir raised its game). Smaller ones included Bath Camerata, Paragon Singers, Chandos Singers and A Handful of Singers (founded around the same time) – have I left one out? I’m not sure how large the Bath Cantata Group is. But there seems to be a gap now – no choir of 35 or so singers in Bath doing an orchestral concert once a year and a couple of other concerts.

I wonder if choirs of this sort of size are just difficult to support financially. I recall the demise of the Brandon Hill Singers who were very similar. We needed a full-size orchestra to do works like the German Requiem and that costs a lot of money, but without the bedrock of thousands of pounds that a full-size symphony chorus raises in subscriptions.

[January 2015: I was talking recently to a member of Bath Cantata Group, and I think this choir is moving towards occupying the Chantry Singers-shaped hole, under its new conductor Neil Moore. Although it’s unauditioned, it is taking on larger works in combination with other choirs.]

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The Assumption in Milan

Posted on September 1, 2014 by vhk10

I have been fortunate to be in Milan for some major festivals of the Church year, and this year we were there on the feast of the Assumption. I went to Vespers, which included a procession around the building for which we were all supplied with a large oil-fired candle. The congregation were allowed to join in the small male-voice choir in the music but I couldn’t because it was not printed out for us and I didn’t know it. Possibly the plainchant was local Ambrosian rite. The more recent music sounded 19th century and maybe if I’d been a traditionalist Catholic I might have recognised it. The liturgy was slick as usual.

We witnessed preparations for another festival, the Sienese Palio, and heard what sounded like football chants sung with varying degrees of harmony and musicality by groups of young people. We worked out that these must be supporters of the various contrade.

We stayed near Lucca, the birthplace of Puccini and Boccherini. We visited the museum in Puccini’s birthplace, full of memorabilia from his career, including a spectacular Turandot costume from the Met, and for some reason lots of stuff relating to Edgar. (N.B. don’t visit the ‘Butterfly’ café opposite, or if you must, don’t sit down! Occupying a table incurs a huge markup.) While in Santa Croce in Florence, I saw Rossini’s tomb; his body was moved there from Paris.

My daughter went to a performance of Madam Butterfly in Lucca and you can read about it in her blog.

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Peterborough pitch

Posted on August 24, 2014 by vhk10

There is a proposal to re-tune the organ at Peterborough Cathedral down to A=440. About a third of the necessary money had been raised when Robert Quinney landed the job at New College Oxford earlier this year, but when the Erleigh Cantors visited to sing for a weekend there was no mention of it by the precentor or on the displays about forthcoming projects at the Cathedral. (I was a little sorry that these proposals did not include the development of a proper choir rehearsal room which could be used by visiting choirs, like the new ones at several other Cathedrals; we rehearsed in a long, narrow and acoustically difficult room in the education centre.) For now, one just has to mentally re-tune when singing there.
[Jan 2015: the funds to re-tune the organ have now been raised. And the next project is a ‘Cathedral and Community Music School’ which I’d hope would include somewhere for visiting choirs to base themselves while at the Cathedral.]

There was one piece that went very high – Britten’s Te Deum in E, which I prefer to his other setting. We paired it with a piece I’d never sung – Mathias’ Jubilate. Actually it isn’t a liturgical Jubilate, but simply a setting of Psalm 100 (AV rather than Coverdale) without a Gloria. Another new piece to me was Gerald Knight’s Now the God of Peace, composed at the conclusion of the Second World War.

Our Mass setting was Cecilia McDowall’s Canterbury Mass. This had some decidedly awkward vocal lines and plenty of time-signature changes. There’s a mediaeval influence underneath it all. More contemporary church music in O Sacrum Convivium by Gabriel Jackson, the first piece I’ve sung by him. My vocal line was not very interesting but the piece set a good post-Communion reflective mood, in a Gorecki-like kind of way.

A new canticle setting for me was Parsons First Service. We debated long and hard about what pitch to sing this at – written pitch sent altos (and at times sopranos) plunging into the depths, but transposing it up distressed those with perfect pitch. Then there was the pitch adjustment required when our starting note came from the organ. Our copy was edited by Magnus Williamson, whom I remember playing the organ on a College choir tour years ago, and who is rather disarming about Parsons’ occasional ineptitude in part-writing. I can see why this setting doesn’t get too many outings – it is rather thick and heavy. Rather more competent Tudor polyphony could be found in Tomkins’ setting of When David heard, our anthem on the Saturday.

We ended our weekend with a big sing – Howells’ St Paul’s Service followed by Stanford’s 23rd Psalm – an old faithful which doesn’t come round very often.

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Singing to Barry Rose

Posted on August 20, 2014 by vhk10

I rejoined Birmingham Conservatoire Camerata for a concert in St Andrew’s Church, Cheddar later in the week. This was sacred and secular choral music loosely grouped by themes and interspersed with some solo items.

There were a couple of pieces I’d heard others perform but never sung myself before: MacMillan’s Strathclyde motet O Radiant Dawn and Barber’s To be sung on the water. We repeated some of the music we sang on Tuesday in Wells, and a piece written by one of our conductors for his wedding.

Most of the other pieces were classics of the repertoire such as Finzi’s God is Gone Up, Haydn’s Insanae et vanae curae, Bainton’s And I saw a new heaven. Secular pieces included Ireland’s The Hills and Elgar’s curious My love dwelt in a Northern land. Where do you suppose this land is meant to be? Scotland? Scandinavia? The beloved was female in the original poem, and I think must have changed sex so that the sopranos become the ones telling the story.

Much of this music took me right back to my own student days when I first encountered it. I don’t think I’ve sung Holst’s Turn Back, O Man since then. Holst in hobnailed boot mode, and with a text by someone whose inspiration ran out halfway though each line!

It was only over a drink at the end that I learned that Barry Rose, who has retired to a neighbouring village, had been in the audience.

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An upper-voice evensong

Posted on August 5, 2014 by vhk10

I don’t think I’d ever sung one of these before. In fact I don’t think I’d sung an upper-voice service since I was at school, though I have sung music for these forces in concerts, most notably in Turin.

I’d been invited (from several directions) to join the Birmingham Conservatoire Camerata on their visit to Wells Cathedral. I was available for their Tuesday evensong, joining five other singers.

The Canticles were a setting by Howard Skempton, written for Edinburgh. I found these tricky to learn until I realised that they seemed to be in the Lydian mode. They are entirely in unison, so no margin for error! The anthem set words from a psalm, by Yfat Soul Zisso, a student at the college, and this was its first performance. It was a tautly constructed piece featuring note clusters, like a lot of contemporary church music.

We sang the upper lines of some unfamiliar 5-part psalm chants. Another first – I sang the (plainchant) versicles and responses. Usually these are done by one of the clergy, or if by someone on the choir, someone in the back row.

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Wyvern Central

Posted on July 7, 2014 by vhk10

I didn’t get to sing in the Great Chorus but there was a reprise of two pieces that were performed at it: Zadok the Priest and the Hallelujah Chorus at the end-of-year Commemoration Service in Bath Abbey. This gathering must be the largest concentration of images of wyverns anywhere – these heraldic beasts are the school mascot and appear on blazers, ties and on the front of the order of service.

It all happened early on Saturday morning (so that we got out of the Abbey before the peak visiting hours). I filled in the second soprano part in Zadok, and because another singer missed the rehearsal and only found out she didn’t have the music for Hallelujah as we were about to sing it, I handed her my copy and did my Bristol Choral party piece of singing it from memory.

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