my top 10 moments in the Grande Messe des Morts

Posted on July 3, 2014 by vhk10

@gloschor

I spent last Saturday rehearsing Berlioz’ Grande Messe des Morts in preparation for performances in the autumn. I’m still smitten by this piece and present my short list of favourite moments. N.B. I don’t want to imply that the rest of the Mass is no good, or that these are necessarily musically the best bits!

  • Bar 55 of the Kyrie. The first real climax of the work, and where you begin to get some idea of what you might be in for.
  • Bar 141 of the Dies Irae. The big guns finally arrive.
  • Bar 240 ‘Judicanti responsura’. After another huge climax, one of a number of quiet, simple closing passages in this work, with the trademark flattened seventh in the bass.
  • The second subject of the Lacrymosa. Berlioz got quite a bit of stick for this beautiful melody on the grounds of inappropriateness. But this is where you can pretend you’re singing Le Spectre de la Rose, until….
  • THAT chord at bar 179. Some years ago, a black hole way out in space was found to be playing a very, very low B flat. And here’s the greatest chord of B flat ever composed. This chord is, quite literally, cosmic.
  • Around bar 67 of the Offertory. Could this have inspired Wagner’s motif of Brünnhilde’s Pleading?
  • The key change on the tenor soloist’s first ‘Sabaoth’. Only a French composer could have written this.
  • Bar 70 of the Agnus Dei. This haunting passage for low voices takes a different turn from its previous occurrences.
  • The closing Amens. Berlioz finished the Mass in a hurry and put together the final movement largely out of music from the earlier ones, with this little coda. (In fact he needn’t actually have bothered setting ‘Amen’ at all as it doesn’t occur in the text of the Requiem Mass at this point.) But when he revised the work he didn’t recompose this bit, so he must have been satisfied with it.

If you’ve been counting, you’ll realise that my list has only nine items. There are a number of possibilities for the tenth one – I’ll wait until I’ve heard an orchestra playing the music, which may make the choice easier, or indeed suggest alternatives.
[And having performed it, I know what to nominate for no. 10 – the interrupted cadence at bar 95 of the Rex tremendae.]

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the frivolous time of year

Posted on June 26, 2014 by vhk10

At this season the music I’m asked to sing tends to lighten up a bit. First up was Rossini’s Messe Solennelle with Bristol Choral Society – the first time I’d performed with them in Bristol Cathedral, so there was new routine to get used to. I’d owned a score of this piece for years – the Cambridge Chamber Group were going to do it and we all bought our scores at a discount from the Cambridge Music Shop, then the performance never happened. This was my first chance to perform it since then.

It resembles his Stabat Mater in that the chorus parts are pretty straightforward, except that Rossini felt a need to put in a fugue, or in this case two, which consumed the lion’s share of rehearsal time. There is also one of the longest waits I know of for chorus while we enjoy listening to the soloists.

A week later there was a wedding at church, the first I’ve sung there. We sang Rutter’s For the beauty of the earth, which is not as easy as it might sound because it has syncopated rhythms which must be snappy, and the inevitable Jesu, joy of Man’s desiring. The words of this really are twaddle and don’t translate the German of Bach’s cantata (no Lutheran would write anything that vacuous). Nor did Bach make the mistake of setting two verses one after the other – in the cantata they are separate movements. This hardly matters as we sang it into the backs of the heads of the wedding party who were signing the register on the altar, and who doubtless were not paying attention to the words.

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At the enthronement

Posted on June 23, 2014 by vhk10

(adapted from an article written for my church magazine)

On June 7th I attended the ‘installation’ (rather as if he were a boiler or a modern artwork) of Peter Hancock as Bishop of Bath and Wells. The doors of Wells Cathedral opened at 1 o’clock, the building filled up almost immediately and we did not emerge for another three hours!

Before the service proper began, various groups of people filed into the building at five-minute intervals, while we heard music from the organist and a brass ensemble. In fact this was the same ensemble I heard at the Bath Festival, and they did some of the same pieces, including O vos omnes by Gesualdo. Another piece of rather dubious relevance to the occasion was an arrangement of Weep, O mine eyes by Wilbye. After a mandate from the Archbishop of Canterbury had been read out, the action really began when the Bishop struck the West door three times with his staff. On being asked by a child ‘Who are you and why are you here?’ he answered ‘I am Peter, a pilgrim and servant of Jesus Christ and I come as one seeking the grace of God…’ and was let in.

Bishop Peter had to declare his assent to the faith of the Church of England and his allegiance to the Queen and the Archbishop, before he was anointed on his forehead and hands, given his ring, robes, mitre and pectoral cross, and set on his throne. The Bishop was then presented to various local representatives. The Lord Lieutenant of Somerset greeted him with the hope that he would be happy in his new home in Wells, which drew a spontaneous round of applause. (I noticed also that the anthem ‘I was glad’ contained the line ‘Plenteousness within thy palaces’!)* He was then officially presented to the congregation.

In the final part of the service Bishop Peter’s ministry began with prayers, Bible readings and his first sermon as Bishop. The sermon centred on Jesus’ commissioning of seventy disciples in the Gospel reading, and Bishop Peter’s role as a catalyst for discipleship in his Diocese. It’s clear that he is going to encourage lay involvement in the Church – nothing new to us, but perhaps a consequence of reduced clergy numbers?

It may sound as if the congregation had little part in the service, but we were able to acclaim and welcome our new Bishop and there were no fewer than seven hymns to sing. These included ‘At the name of Jesus’ (to the 60s tune ‘Camberwell’ which some of us remember from school), ‘Guide me O Thou great Redeemer’ and that evangelical favourite ‘And can it be?’.

As you might expect from Wells, the music was of a very high standard. There were two new anthems, one a setting of (inevitably) Tu es Petrus by Jeremy Woodside which musically speaking did what it said on the tin, the other a rather more complex and demanding setting by Robert Walker of words by the Indian mystic Kabir. During the latter piece a pupil from The Blue School danced a ballet routine, largely en pointe. The enthronement was celebrated with William Walton’s ‘Coronation Te Deum’.

My church was well represented with seven of our congregation there. After the service we were offered tea and cake outside on the Cathedral Green before dispersing.

[There had at one point been a proposal – dropped after protests – to accommodate the Bishop outside Wells rather than in the Bishop’s Palace]

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Trwy’r anialwch

Posted on June 10, 2014 by vhk10

One of the most famous poetic evocations of the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness is in Welsh (look in your hymnbook). So it seemed appropriate to see Moses und Aron in Cardiff, complete with Welsh surtitles. Really though I was forced to do so because Welsh National Opera weren’t taking the production to Bristol.

The production has had mixed reviews, and certainly the first act seemed awkwardly staged in some sort of lecture theatre. The large chorus (60+) didn’t have room to to move around, and as they picked up chairs at the end I was reminded of the close of staff meetings at work. Furthermore, the references to Moses and Aron approaching from far away didn’t work. In the second act the Golden Calf was replaced by a film, supposedly projected where the audience were sitting. We found this worked rather better; there are no references in the libretto to the precise shape of the image, but plenty to its illusory nature. Some reviews likened the setting to the Arab Spring, although the production is a few years earlier.

At the root of it all though is the question: just what is the opera about? Is it specifically religious, or is it saying something more general? What is the effect of omitting the Egyptians (who never appear) and barely referring to the patriarchs of Genesis, so that God’s relationship with Israel seems to start with Moses? If Moses somehow represents Schoenberg himself, who is Aron? Adolf Hitler and Alban Berg seem to be the main candidates. The latter interpretation is not going to endear the opera to Berg enthusiasts, but it is hard to dismiss completely the idea that it examines the artistic relationship between Schoenberg and his pupil, strained by Berg’s reluctance to abandon keys completely (I have a theory that at one level Lulu is also about this relationship, but won’t go into it here). As the naked virgins line up to be sacrificed, you feel like saying ‘Do lighten up a bit – it’s just some tonality!’ This interpretation does offer an explanation for Schoenberg’s failure to complete the opera. In the third act Moses denounces Aron, who drops down dead, and this could have become impossible to set after Berg died in 1935. On the other hand, Schoenberg had known problems with finishing lengthy works, and his Act 3 libretto is undramatic.

If Schoenberg depicted himself as as the inarticulate Moses, he did himself a disservice, since his writings in German and English are clear and elegant.

Performance-wise, everything seem to be in place and the orchestra and chorus played and sang superbly, with the orchestral detail coming over nicely in the Millennium Centre’s acoustic. Aron was sung by Mark le Brocq, with whom I used to sing in the Cambridge Taverner Choir. One could not tell that he was standing in for Rainer Trost, as he appeared completely comfortable with both the vocal and staging demands of the role. Moses was Sir John Tomlinson, who delivered his lines with great feeling and often lying or sitting down.

Hear for yourself on Radio 3 on Monday 17 June. I don’t know which performance this was recorded at, but Mark le Brocq is singing in it.

Reviews:

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after the 2014 Festival

Posted on June 5, 2014 by vhk10

@KirstenTElliott

The Bath International Music Festival has been and gone, Alasdair Nicolson’s second and last as Artistic Director. I have been told a fair amount about the last couple of festivals by several people closely involved, but should not repeat it here. However, at a time of change I will say that I think some of the Festival’s problems are a few years old. In 2010 the Festival was scaled back, not just in time and number of events, but also by focusing on classical music. A number of regular features of the Festival were dropped – for example, the local historian Kirsten Elliott’s walking tours of Bath. These weren’t a huge money-spinner, but cost very little to put on – no venue hire, just Kirsten’s fee – and tended to sell out. They can’t have been axed on economic grounds.

The tours are running again, but are now part of the Bath Literature Festival. And that I think is part of the problem – that the International Music Festival has been overtaken by other festivals in Bath which go on longer and have more events, and is having to compete with them for Council and other funding. It has I fear rather rested on its laurels and given up its primacy without realising it.

[October 2014: We were promised news of the 2015 Festival soon after 2014’s ended, but nothing yet, not even dates (I discount a web page which seems to think it’s going to be in March!). This doesn’t look good.]

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inside the Masonic Hall

Posted on May 28, 2014 by vhk10

I’d never been in a Masonic hall before, but Bath’s was used for a series of late-night concerts in the Festival. These were informal, in that you could take your drink into the concert hall and the seats were unreserved. The Masonic Hall was the original Theatre Royal, although quite a bit must have changed. There is now a triptych at one end showing King Solomon flanked by two others, and a fine chequered floor can be seen in photos, although at the concert it was covered with boring blue carpet (to protect it from women’s heels?!), as was the lower part of the triptych (perhaps it shows things non-Masons are not supposed to see?) I would guess that, after the Church and some civic organisations, Freemasonry must be one of the main clients for ceremonial embroidery, and this hall contained some of the most beautifully embroidered banners in Bath, thought it’s not clear where they get paraded.

The well-attended concert was a harp recital by Gabriella dall’Olio loosely based on a theme of sleep, and interspersing earlier pieces with contemporary ones (two composers were present). I enjoyed it without being really grabbed by any particular piece. The harp can produce a variety of tone, but aggression doesn’t really fall easily in its range. Some of the modern pieces seemed to be striving too hard to avoid the glissando and accompanied melody clichés; I thought David Knott’s Entice the dewy-feather’d Sleep succeeded best.

My husband went to hear the Gould Piano Trio play Beethoven’s Op. 121a and Brahms’ Op. 87, together with Peter Maxwell Davies’ A Voyage to Fair Isle and the première of James MacMillan’s second piano trio. Both Maxwell Davies and MacMillan were present, though I fear we’re unlikely ever to see a repeat of the 2005 concert where the latter conducted the Bath Festival Chorus. The two 21st century pieces came off well, especially the Maxwell Davies, but he felt that including the Brahms after other substantial pieces was a strain on the concentration of both performers and audience.

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Shopping songs

Posted on May 27, 2014 by vhk10

I was very proud to see my youngest child performing along with others in his class in the Bath Festival in a free lunchtime concert of music written for children by Peter Maxwell Davies and Alasdair Nicolson, the Festival’s director. The two groups of songs were on the theme of shopping, in Kirkwall and Bath respectively. Accompaniment was on piano and for the Nicolson songs an ensemble from Wells Cathedral School, which occasionally obscured the singing (at least from where I was). I’d seen the words and music coming back in the school bag and it was a real achievement for them all to learn the songs from memory and deliver them confidently.

The concert also included a brass ensemble playing arrangements by Maxwell Davies of Tallis and Gesualdo (I recognised O Vos Omnes in the latter set).

The concert took place in St. Michael’s Without, and was well attended. (You are guaranteed an audience of parents at least, if you involve primary school children). It was in competition with the boilers and washing up from the church café; how much these interfered with the music depended on where you were sitting.

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See Australia!

Posted on May 25, 2014 by vhk10

Some of us in the Erleigh Cantors felt that Tourism Australia should have sponsored our concert at St. Peter’s Earley, because of its potential for subliminal advertising. One piece we performed was Bob Chilcott’s setting of the Ave Maris Stella from his Salisbury Vespers, and on our practice recording the repeated phrase ‘sea most radiant’ came out sounding like ‘See Australia’.

We exploited the opportunity to deploy singers around the church in this piece and even more so in another Marian anthem, John Tavener’s Annunciation, where the solo quartet were in a small gallery off on one side of the west end of the church. For their final appearance they moved deeper into the gallery for a more distant effect. I just had a D to sing in this piece; our third Marian piece, Holst’s Ave Maria, was more demanding.

Our programme began with three Tudor pieces, including two rarities. I think I’ve only sung Weelkes’ O Lord, arise once before, with this choir, perhaps because it’s not very obvious what season the words would be suitable for. And it’s in lots of parts. And Morley’s Out of the deep is a real rarity, in that I’ve recorded it but not performed it! The recording was when I was a student, and we had a tenor soloist; this time the soloist was an alto.

Vaughan Williams’ Three Choral Hymns were new to me. Written for a festival choir, they are really quite hard work because they demand a lot of continuous sustained singing. They have some tricky key changes too – the transition from minor to major in a couple of them isn’t so obvious when the ‘minor’ is really modal. Alongside this we performed Holst’s This have I done for my true love. The more I look at the words of this, the more intriguing they are. They can’t have been composed by some illiterate yokel – consider the ABAB rhyme scheme and the various Latin-derived words which rhyme with ‘dance’. But they must have gone through a period of oral transmission before reaching Sandys’ collection, during which this rhyme scheme has been lost in a few of the verses. Is there any evidence they are Cornish, as the score asserts?

Our final piece was John Rutter’s sequence of spiritual arrangements Feel the Spirit, which we did with piano accompaniment. I felt the most successful numbers here were where Rutter allowed his own voice to show through (as in the solo part in Deep River) rather than pretending he was in New Orleans or Alabama. I’m pretty certain some of the words (for example ‘Hallelujah brothers, hallelujah sisters, Hear the music going round and around’) were added by Rutter himself, but if they are traditional I’m willing to be corrected. These were in the finale, O when the Saints, which I once had the pleasure of singing under the baton of Rutter himself when he took a choral workshop in Manchester.

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Violetta’s back-story

Posted on May 19, 2014 by vhk10

One of the most poignant moments in the current (actually 20-year-old) Royal Opera House production of La Traviata comes even before the curtain rises; during the overture, images of 19th-century poverty-stricken girls are projected on it, to suggest Violetta’s origins and indeed recall the real Marie Duplessis on whom she is based. Violetta’s history before she becomes a poule de luxe is usually a conspicuous blank in the opera – she appears to have no family and never speaks of her childhood, though there are plenty of opportunities for her to do so.

I had great difficulty obtaining tickets for the performance. I was poised at the computer the moment tickets went on sale, grabbed a pair of the few remaining seats and then had an hour to pay for them before they were recycled and available for others to purchase. There must have been only seconds to spare when I finally got through to pay, owing to a bug in the site which only revealed itself when many people accessed it at once. Our seats were in the balcony, a long way round to the left so we had only a partial view of the stage.

I can see why this production keeps on coming round – it has lavish and attractive sets and costumes. (I was particularly taken with Flora’s beaded dress in Act II). They are broadly naturalistic, although something very odd has happened to the perspective in the second part of Act II; perhaps we are supposed to be seeing it through an alcoholic haze?

Diana Damrau rose to the vocal demands of the title rôle, though her gestures still had some of the old-school histrionics about them. (A hazard of international casts who are thrown together is potential inconsistency of acting styles.) She was especially impressive at projecting while facing downwards or towards the back of the stage. Francesco Demuro as Alfredo orbited around her in the required way; we thought he sounded a little shrill at times and he was definitely something of a wimp, indeed at one point quite literally a pushover. Dmitri Hvorostovsky brought the right sort of gravitas to his father, though as he was mostly on the left of the stage we didn’t see much of him. He drew a round of applause merely for walking on stage, and applause at the wrong time seemed to be a recurring problem – the abrupt shift into the cabaletta after Ah fors’è lui was obscured by another bout of it.

The orchestral playing seemed fine to me, but somehow lacklustre. This was the opinion of some of the reviewers cited below (others can be found in blogs):

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When our families are broken, when our homes are full of strife

Posted on May 9, 2014 by vhk10

The above text has just been added to the list of inappropriate/tasteless things I’ve sung at weddings (most singers I know have such a list). It was the first line of a verse of a hymn we sang during the signing of the register at the most recent wedding I sang for. Fortunately the words were not printed in the order of service, and I suppressed my musicianship and mumbled most of them, so the congregation would perceive only the tune (we sang it to Hyfrydol).

Our reward was refreshments at the end of the service. And they were served immediately – the champagne was being poured at the back of the church during the final blessing. But a rather telling attitude to the choir was shown by the two photographers who were in attendance throughout. They must have taken hundreds of photos between them, covering every aspect of the ceremony, except the choir, who appeared to be just part of the furniture as far as they were concerned. I had been told ‘you know the bride – so-and-so’s daughter’ but it turned out she’d ceased going to the church regularly by the time I joined and then moved away from the area. We had probably been in the building at the same time only on a handful of previous occasions some fifteen years before.

Recent experiences have made me think about whether I should be more selective about accepting invitations to sing at weddings. I don’t get very many and tend to accept all the ones I’m able to do. But a worst-case scenario would run as follows (this is not an account of any single actual occasion): I spend an hour travelling (in order to arrive an hour and a half before the starting time) and then the ceremony (involving two people I’ve never met, and who wouldn’t be able to name a single member of the choir that is singing for them) starts half an hour or so late. I sing a few rather banal hymns in unison, craning my head to share with another singer because there are only a handful of orders of service for the choir, and a very simple anthem, sit through the rest of the service, and am ‘paid’ with a chocolate or two before returning home. Is this a sensible use of my time and abilities, or am I being taken advantage of?

In other words, should I insist on being paid a fee when I sing at weddings, unless I know the couple well enough to make my services a present to them? (Or – lest I seem too mercenary – unless the church or choir is given a donation equivalent to the fees for the wedding singers?) There are a few other factors to take into consideration:

  • the venue – I don’t mind throwing in a wedding as part of a Cathedral weekend, if I’m going to be there anyway
  • the social side – will there be people there I know but don’t see regularly?
  • the networking potential – is the conductor someone I’d like to sing more for in future?
  • the standard of performance – will I be singing in a really good group? (In practice this tends not to happen often at the weddings I’m invited to sing at)
  • the repertoire – will there be some really interesting music to sing? (Again, this rarely happens. The most ambitious piece I’ve done at a wedding was Spem in Alium – but all that choir were also guests.)
  • the congregation-building potential – might the music at the ceremony attract people to come to other services at the church? My church in particular draws few of its congregation from nearby streets, and it is always good to welcome new people into the building. But if the bride and groom have never lived nearby, their guests are unlikely to do so, or to want to attend that church.

I’ll try to be more discriminating in future but I suspect that I will have my arm twisted and the end result will be the same.

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Dedicating the Dobson organ

Posted on April 30, 2014 by vhk10

It’s not every day you get to go to a 750th birthday event. I attended the dedication evensong for the new organ in Merton College Chapel in Oxford, at which one of my friends and contemporaries was preaching.

The choral pieces overlapped with what I’ve heard the choir sing on previous occasions, but the anthem was Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens, sung enthusiastically yet precisely, although there was a point when the ensemble with the organ failed for a few bars. There were lots of hymns for the congregation, and otiose descants (a common problem nowadays) were avoided. We had Psalm 150 to the gorgeous 5-part chant by Parratt.

The service ended with the congregation moving to the antechapel for the blessing of the organ by the Bishop of Oxford. Congregational procession is always a dodgy business in Church of England churches. It just doesn’t come very naturally to English people, who tend to shuffle around in an embarrassed way, many of them clutching coats and bags that they have brought in and don’t want to leave behind in their pew. The Bishop was very efficient anyway, though after the service the holy water was hastily wiped off lest it damage the instrument. Maybe he would have done better to use one of those misters that hairdressers have.

I hadn’t actually heard the choir singing from the choir stalls recently, because when I have attended broadcasts, they have stood in front of them and near the screen. The acoustic has the same trick as Bath Abbey, that you can be near the choir (I was in the next rank of stalls) but yet the sound appears to be coming from much further away. I notice that the Chapel now has discreet amplification, which on the whole the large Oxbridge chapels have tended to eschew.

It would have been nice, given that the service showcased the organ, to have had the pieces played before the service (some of which I recognised) listed in the order of service. (It turned out that they were listed in the Chapel music list for the term.) I’m not really qualified to comment on its sound except that it met with general approval. I haven’t yet heard it in French repertoire which requires a rather different sound and I had of course been a bit spoilt by hearing the newly restored Festival Hall organ the previous week. The service both began and concluded with a tinkle on its Zymbelstern.

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Good Friday and Easter 2014

Posted on April 29, 2014 by vhk10

This was actually my first Good Friday singing in the church choir (I’d been away the last two years), and this year the service took the form of Stations of the Cross with musical interludes. There were some new pieces which were new to me: Leighton’s Solus ad victimam (not as daunting as it seemed because much of it is in unison), and de Morales’ Parce mihi, Domine, setting a rather unusual text from the funeral service.

On Easter Day we opened the service with Ola Gjeilo’s Prelude, whose text is a variant of that set by Mozart in his Exultate, Jubilate. Gjeilo had obviously been listening to Duruflé’s Tota pulchra es when he wrote the central section.

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