a local première of the Glagolitic Mass?

Posted on March 11, 2014 by vhk10

@bristolchoral

I’ve been going round saying that our forthcoming Glagolitic Mass is the first in the Bath/Bristol area for at least 20 years. Then I started to wonder whether it was in fact the first ever.

Unless you have a recently composed or recently published work, it’s only possible to check this for large-scale works, and even then one can’t easily have full confidence that one hasn’t overlooked a performance. Some long-established choirs have potted histories on their website which might mention notable previous concerts. But then again they might not, and there are other ways a performance might not have left a trace on a web page: choirs that no longer exist (e.g. Brandon Hill Singers, Bath Festival Chorus), choirs one may not have thought of, choirs that were assembled for a particular performance (quite common round here), visiting orchestras which brought their own choir with them.

Actually collective memory will take you quite a long way back. If no one who’s been in the local choir scene for some decades can remember a performance of a major choral work, then chances are there hasn’t been one in that time. One local oracle did say that Richard Hickox wanted to do the Glagolitic Mass with the Bath Festival Chorus, but it never happened. (Some of our choir did however get to perform it under his direction in Cardiff.)

The Cambridge Music Handbook for the Mass describes early performances in Britain, leaving a window of some fifteen years or so when there might have been one in Bristol or Bath which has escaped my radar. Given that Janáček was not hugely popular in Britain at that time and the Mass really requires a professional orchestra, I’m willing to stand by my assertion that we have a local première on our hands. If this is used to publicise our performance, it can always be qualified by saying that this is believed to be the first one in the area.

(It is not, however, the first in SW England. I have turned up an account of a performance given by the Exmouth Choral Society about 20 years ago. Another possible local première I think is our performance of Verdi’s Quattro Pezzi Sacri last year.)

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The Great Chorus

Posted on March 5, 2014 by vhk10

The children’s school is putting on one of its occasional concerts in which they invite parents and others associated with the school to boost the school choirs in a concert. I sang in the last of these; unfortunately I will be away for the next one, but I’ve been going to rehearsals anyway for fun and socialising.

The programme is a selection of well-known classical choruses. So for example a chunk of the Polovstian Dances comes round again (this time in English), and we warm up to Va Pensiero (this time in Italian). The only new music for me was Orff’s O Fortuna, which fortunately I’ve avoided until now, and almost avoided this time as I’ve only had to rehearse it once. That old May Week standby, Zadok the Priest, has taken up a fair amount of rehearsal time. On a more reflective note are the In Paradisum from Fauré’s Requiem and the Lacrymosa from Mozart’s. I can’t be the only person who can’t sing the latter without thinking of the final scene from Amadeus. Those two final chords are so very final – but was Mozart planning a fugal Amen instead, as has been conjectured, and indeed reconstructed? When I prefer the standard ending, am I falling into the same Romantic trap as those who truncated Don Giovanni so that it ended with the Don being dragged off to hell?

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a Bath Camerata workshop

Posted on March 4, 2014 by vhk10

I didn’t attend the workshop which invited others to join the Bath Camerata to rehearse and perform a short programme, but came along to the concert at the end. Partly because it was local, but also to meet Camerata members whom I hadn’t seen for a while. There is still a core of people from the now rather distant time when I sang with the choir, although they don’t necessarily remember me or if they do, are a bit hazy about me. I’d like to think I’m still on the register of former members, although the admin of the choir has been overhauled recently and it’s a bit hard to find out about this list. It would be good to join again in an expanded-choir Good Friday concert – perhaps for the choir’s 30th birthday in a couple of years?

The assembled singers performed a sequence of pieces from various times and places. A few weren’t known to me. I particularly enjoyed a section from Eric Whitacre’s Leonardo Dreams of his Flying Machine, depicting the machine in flight. Though it was missing the bump when it landed (I write as an aviator’s daughter here). It shows Whitacre (perhaps unlike Lauridsen) has a variety of strings to his bow and doesn’t just write the same piece over and over. The extra singers seemed to fit in well with the regulars, though I couldn’t help noticing the bass section made a noise out of proportion to their numbers!

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Martin and Tallis in the Victoria Rooms

Posted on March 4, 2014 by vhk10

After my awful experience with the toaster last time, I made sure that the programme for the Bristol University Singers’ concert was unaccompanied. They interleaved Frank Martin’s Mass for double choir with Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah, in a demanding programme of some 50 minutes of continuous singing.

I have never sung the Martin, although I have been in choirs which have sung it, or which could sing it (I think it would be a lot easier to do if some choir members had performed the piece before). As a result, I associate mainly it with my godson’s christening on an Easter Day in King’s College Chapel. The main difficulty seems to be the rhythmic complexity. Apart from this piece, Martin’s music seems to have disappeared from the repertoire these days, or are there other compositions I’ve missed?

The Tallis came off rather less well. This piece juxaposes beautiful mellifluous music, including that wonderful monotone, with a text describing total devastation. I felt the words needed more emphasis here. I suspect the Martin had taken up most of the rehearsal time and effort.

Incidentally this concert was very well attended, so much so that the programmes ran out. The programme notes for these concerts are well researched and worth reading, so fortunately I was able to find a copy afterwards that had been left behind.

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Why I’m like Lohengrin

Posted on February 19, 2014 by vhk10

There was a mildly embarrassing moment at the beginning of our opera gala concert last weekend: as usual, we were all lined up in rows to process on and the names of those on the end of each row (including mine) were read out in turn, so that we could take our place on the stairs backstage. But when it came to mine, no one else moved after me because none of the other singers in my row knew what my name was.

We performed an extract from Lohengrin, the famous wedding chorus. Unlike the times when I’ve sung this at actual weddings, we sang the central section for upper voices. (The short interlude which follows this was surely the most beautiful music in the entire concert.) Wagner was also represented by the Act 3 chorus and chorale from Meistersinger, though I’d rather have had the chorale from the opening scene of the opera, which turns the Meistersinger theme into a hymn tune which made it as far as the English Hymnal. Clever old Wagner – he should really have written some more hymn tunes.

Puccini featured strongly, in the shape of chunks of La Bohème, O mio babbino caro and as the grand finale Nessun Dorma (with a reprise of the tune for the chorus so we got the top B near the end). I was sat near the percussion section, and was interested to observe how he uses little touches of percussion sparingly. The only Verdi was the Grand March from Aida, and the other choral contributions were a chunk of The Pirates of Penzance and a lower-voices chorus from The Magic Flute. There were other items from our soloists, and all the programme was introduced by Donald Maxwell.

I haven’t done this sort of concert before, and it’s a good way to get to sing repertoire which I wouldn’t normally perform. The poor weather probably deterred people from turning up to buy tickets at the door, but we had a good number to sing to.

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My 13

Posted on February 18, 2014 by vhk10

The new Op13 music shop in Bristol has some posters inside, each showing 13 composers chosen by local musicians, some known personally to me. I couldn’t see them without thinking of what my own list would be and have used Wordle to create the following:

Wordle: My 13 composers

There won’t be surprises to regular readers of this blog. Ask me another day, though, and you might get a different answer. I could well imagine Brahms displacing Haydn, for example.

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Is choral poaching wrong?

Posted on February 15, 2014 by vhk10

It’s a strong term for something that it’s unpleasant to be on the wrong side of. I’m referring to the practice of persuading members of other choirs to leave and join yours instead. It’s commonest when there is a shortage of singers or when there is intense rivalry between choirs.

Poaching was rife between Cambridge college chapel choirs when I was there. If you went to another College to sing for any reason, chances were their chapel choir might get wind of you and try to recruit you. You didn’t have to be really top-notch to have a lot of this; I was approached unsuccessfully by three college choirs outside my own College, and successfully (for a year anyway) by a fourth.

It didn’t happen between chamber choirs in Manchester because it couldn’t; at the time I lived there there was only really one, the William Byrd Singers. However it certainly went on between the Hallé and the RLPO choruses.

When I’d moved to the South West, I saw it contributing to the demise of the Brandon Hill Singers. They changed conductors, and although there was a stop-gap concert in the term before the new one took over, during that time other choirs stepped in to lure singers away. So many left that the choir became unviable.

Since I launched myself on the symphony chorus circuit, I’ve started to experience it again. It’s quite gentle: someone says ‘Why do you go to Bristol to sing? Why not sing with us in in Bath?’ I do have a standard answer to this (it begins ‘When did any Bath choir last sing the Glagolitic Mass?’) So I’ve been thinking about poaching recently. Is it really wrong, and how can choirs guard against it?

There’s a good argument in favour of it. Some singers value singing with the same group of people for a long time; others are always on the lookout for interesting repertoire, the best possible standards, solo opportunities, exotic tours etc. Why not tell such singers about other choirs that might interest them?

I’m fully in agreement with this, and yet still feel that the predatory behaviour of other choirs towards the Brandon Hill Singers wasn’t really fair. I think it is because it was raiding another choir wholesale at a time when it was vulnerable, rather than approaching individuals for their own benefit.

What can choirs do? You can’t prevent poaching altogether, of course, and it isn’t necessarily detrimental because the singers who go might be ones who didn’t really fit in anyway. But there are particular points at which it is especially dangerous. During a change of conductor is an obvious one. Those who have recently joined and are yet to form a strong attachment are also at risk of being poached. More generally, it is a good idea for those who run choirs to give members a real opportunity to express any concerns they have, before too much damage is done. I have certainly come across choral directors who assume their singers exist in a vacuum and never talk to any members of any other choirs, forgetting that singers are not pawns on a chessboard, but people who can up and go elsewhere. (I must add this is not true of any choir that I currently sing in, though it was true of at least one in the lifetime of this blog.)

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Keith James Clarke, Mahler’s Heavenly Retreats

Posted on February 8, 2014 by vhk10

These ‘encounters with the master’s Composing Houses’ are written by an architect and Mahler enthusiast. Our copy was given to some family members while they were standing in a Prom queue.

It’s a popular cliché now that men like sheds, and Gustav Mahler was fortunate enough to have isolated single-roomed buildings constructed near his summer places of residence, in which he could compose at peace. Clarke has examined these three buildings, considering their materials, construction, location and fittings, and relating them to Mahler’s needs and the music that was composed in them.

The most illuminating part of this analysis is that which is informed by an architect’s knowledge and way of thinking (but not too technical), which finds points of interest the casual visitor would miss. The descriptions of the surroundings of the composing houses tend to get bogged down in detail such as the colour of birds’ beaks. And the opening chapter on ‘Genius Loci’ doesn’t really go very deeply into the question of the relationship between a creative artist and a place, but just piles up a list of examples. There has been a lot of work on this relationship recently, and the book might have benefited by collaboration with someone who had studied it closely. Clarke knows Mahler’s works well, but wisely does not try to suggest many precise connexions between details of the music and landscape or events.

The book is illustrated with careful line drawings of the buildings and their details (sometimes with Mahler drawn in too!) and some rather blurred photographs. There is a rather amusing table at the end, rating each composing house from 1 to 5 according to various criteria such as ‘Light Intensity Inside’, ‘Proximity to Biting Insects during Summers’ (more of a concern for Berg than Mahler, I’d have thought), ‘View of Sky’, ‘Thermal Mass’, ‘User Satisfaction for Mahler’ and so on.

Not having been to any of these houses, I can’t comment on accuracy of detail, though the low-lying mist 15 m above a lake (p. 36) is presumably a misprint.

I’m not a Mahlerian, but if you are interested in his life and work, it’s worth getting hold of this; it’s an easy and short read. There are an accompanying DVD and CD; I don’t have these, but I notice there is a YouTube lecture by the author.

  • 60 pages
  • Publisher: Oblique Angle Publishing (1 Nov 2006)
  • ISBN-10: 0955408008

(cross-posted from here).

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the toaster in the Victoria Rooms

Posted on February 5, 2014 by vhk10

I made time at lunchtime to go and hear the University Chamber Choir and the Madrigal Ensemble give a lunchtime concert in the concert hall at the Victoria Rooms. The Chamber Choir is rather large for a group of that name – about 60 strong – and the Madrigal Ensemble is a select 16; one bass sang in both. The Victoria Rooms concert hall has had the promised refit; it is now equipped for note-taking (and conference income) but the antique notice pointing the way out to the telephones is still there!

The music was a mixture of periods, nationalities and liturgical seasons (apart from two madrigals it was all sacred). Mostly familiar to me, though I hadn’t heard Philip Stopford’s lovely setting of the Coventry Carol, and pieces by Josquin and Bertholusius were also unfamiliar. The sound of both groups was strong and confident; my only criticism being some slightly dodgy tuning (or was it wrong notes?) in some passages which moved by step. (The sort of thing that gets worked on heavily in Bristol Choral Society rehearsals.) But as I’ve said before, these choirs avoid the usual problem of student choirs, that of being top-heavy.

The programme was almost all unaccompanied, and I wish it had all been so. The instrument in the Victoria Rooms is a toaster (all right, a digitising organ) of some antiquity. I am not a fan of toasters, but I concede that they have come on quite a lot in the last 20 years or so, and I’d have been quite happy with a decent one in this concert. (On a related topic, I ask again: what did happen to the organ which must once have lived in St. George’s Bristol? Couldn’t it have been retained when the building was made into a concert hall?)

However, the sound produced by the Victoria Rooms concert hall ‘organ’ is so hideous that it almost made me feel physically ill. The bass throbbed, making my eardrums rattle and setting my teeth on edge, and the treble was distorted and hollow. The first piece that was wrecked by this was a personal favourite: Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen from the German Requiem, which made it even worse. I just about managed to endure the sound to the end of Blest Pair of Sirens, which followed. Fortunately in this last the choir sounded loud enough to drown out the organ a bit. I’ve only sung the Parry a couple of times, as it’s gone out of favour both in church and on the concert platform – it seems to go by so fast when you sing it that I hadn’t realised how long it is.

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the Glagolitic Mass on YouTube

Posted on February 1, 2014 by vhk10

@bristolchoral

I am greatly looking forward to performing the Glagolitic Mass for the first time. I can’t recall its being done in the Bath/Bristol area in recent years, and in fact until I started to learn it I was unfamiliar with the work, with only a hazy idea of how it sounded. I’ve been remedying this by listening to it several times a week. Fortunately, the Glagolitic Mass can stand up to this; a weaker piece would pall on repeated listenings, and something like the War Requiem would be very taxing because of its emotional impact.

I have been listening to three performances on YouTube:

  • Mackerras/Czech Philharmonic We had this recording on a Supraphon LP as well, which I have transferred to CD. It has the wonderful unreconstructed Central European brass, but I don’t like the tenor or bass soloist.
  • Tennstedt/London Philharmonic This recording is OK. I am puzzled by the picture of the Northern Lights which illustrates it though, as the Lights are very rarely seen as far south as Central Europe!
  • Mackerras/Danish National Radio SO and Chorus This is my favoured recording for learning purposes for two reasons:
    • while the choir does not produce a totally pure Scandinavian/Baltic sound (nor should it), it has a clear tone which makes it easy to follow
    • they appear to use the same edition as us, with the high B flat Osanna near the end of Svet

    However, I don’t like beginning the work as well as ending with the Intrada; I prefer to start with the blaring brass.

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two Abbey services and a funeral

Posted on January 31, 2014 by vhk10

I joined the choir of St. Peter’s Caversham to sing a Saturday Evensong in Bath Abbey. Our canticles were Stanford in G and the introit and anthem were selected for Epiphany: Here is the Little Door by Howells, and Mendelssohn’s When Jesus our Lord. This latter made me regret how little of Christus Mendelssohn completed. Had he finished the oratorio, I’m sure it would have become a great choral society staple.

A week later I heard the girls of the Abbey choir singing evensong; nicely done, but I find upper-voice only services a little dull.

More recently I returned to my former church to sing at a funeral (curiously, during the 10+ years I went there, I don’t think I attended one!) We performed the Nunc from one of the canticle settings I used to sing there, Walmisley in D minor, and ignored the KJV psalm printed in the order of service in favour of the Coverdale pointed in the psalters. Not much had changed apart from the installation of some rather scratchy amplification, but the new priest failed the ‘week by week’ test. (When I hear this and related phrases in a sermon, I find myself switching off. They only ever occur in sermons, and are used in about half of the sermons I hear.)

Meanwhile I’d posted a comment on the blog run by one of the choirs who promised me an audition a few years ago, which produced a reply. It was clear though that they’d forgotten all about me, not even remembering whether I sang soprano or alto.

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Shading into Epiphany at Southwell

Posted on January 26, 2014 by vhk10

First engagement of 2014 was when the Cathedral Chamber Choir went to Southwell Minster for a weekend of services. Liturgically, the weekend shaded from Christmas into the first Evensong of Epiphany, and our choice of music reflected this.

Karl Rütti’s setting of I wonder as I wander comes round about once every 3 years at the King’s 9 Lessons broadcast, and I’ve tended to think that it’s a makeweight, included so as to free rehearsal time for more complex pieces. But it’s harder than it sounds, largely because the rhythm varies slightly from verse to verse.

The other piece new to me was Ecce virgo concipiet by Byrd; I realise there are lots of Byrd’s Latin pieces that I’ve still yet to sing. The anthem for Sunday evensong was Mendelssohn’s Frohlocket, ihr Völker – somehow Mendelssohn’s writing for voices seems much denser when it’s in German. Southwell permits, indeed encourages, introits and ours was the opening of Britten’s A Boy was Born. I was one of few in the choir who’d sung the entire piece, back in my days with the Brandon Hill Singers.

The rest of the music was rather more familiar: Noble in B minor, Smith responses, Stanford in A and at Communion Howells ‘Coll. Reg.’ The catch here was that it was a Book of Common Prayer Communion, with the Gloria at the end.

We were made welcome and enjoyed our visit – it’s just a pity that the awkward journey (however achieved) to and from the East Midlands from the South West puts this lovely Cathedral a bit out of range for me.

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