Performing the Glagolitic Mass

Posted on April 28, 2014 by vhk10

@bristolchoral
We gave two performances of the Mass on successive nights, the first in Colston Hall, the second in the Royal Festival Hall. This marked my Royal Festival Hall début!

I have a principle of not evaluating here concerts that I myself took part in, even to say that they went particularly well. However I’ll relax this to say that the London performance had some advantages over the Bristol one. One was the RFH’s recently restored organ, played by Thomas Trotter. (There was an interesting exhibition about the building of this instrument – I particularly enjoyed the appropriately waspish letters from Vaughan Williams). The Philharmonia Orchestra was also larger (8 double basses instead of 6, for example). Although some of Bristol and Gloucester Choral Society didn’t make it to London, the Philharmonia Voices boosted the remainder.

Nevertheless, there were some special moments at Colston Hall. The conductor, Jakub Hrůša, came round afterwards to shake the hand of every choir member he could find. (I contrast this with the time a few years ago when I joined a small choir to sing another tricky 20th-century Central European Mass setting – Kodály’s Missa Brevis – on one rehearsal, and the conductor made no acknowledgement at all of the extra singers individually or collectively.) I was sat near the orchestra as I was in the last concert, and I couldn’t think why I had a draught playing on my back in the normally warm hall – then I realised the curtain screening the organ pipes had been drawn back.

The programme for the rest of the concert (which we were allowed to listen to from our choir seating) differed slightly between the two concerts. Both contained Dvořák’s piano concerto, but even Lukáš Vondráček couldn’t really sell the piece to me. The 19th century piano concerto was usually a display piece, and this was alien to Dvořák’s melodically inventive style. Or perhaps the concerto is just too early, and shares the relative obscurity of the earlier symphonies. In Bristol we heard the overture to the Bartered Bride (I wonder if this is still thought of as a crowd-puller – I’m not sure it is one now that the opera itself is a rarity). In London the concert opened with Suk’s Scherzo Fantastique which I enjoyed rather more.

It is a pity that no national paper seems to have reviewed the London concert. However there are the following online reviews:

Classical Source
Bachtrack (doesn’t name the choirs!)

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Learning the Glagolitic Mass

Posted on April 21, 2014 by vhk10

Our two performances of the Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass were sufficiently remarkable that they merit two posts. I’ll begin by considering the problems I encountered in learning the Mass.

The obvious one is the language. It ought to be no harder than, say, Rachmaninov’s Vespers, but rather than being transliterated for the benefit of English speakers you have the words written out for speakers of Czech, and it can be hard to spot the difference between, say, n and ń. Fortunately there are not too many words for the chorus (the lower voices seem to have more) and so it is possible to memorise the tricky bits.

The score used was the new Bärenreiter edition, but the chorus hire copies were Universal Edition’s, which tended to obscure the dynamic markings and orchestral cues, and had some of the nastiest page turns I’ve ever encountered. A particular speciality was splitting the first and second soprano parts in the first bar at the start of a new page, without warning.

This is all apart from the difficulties in the work itself. Some people I know who’ve sung the Mass have said they found it unsatisfactory because it was very ‘stop-start’, without long, sustained lines. This may just be because of Janáček’s style, or the fragmentation of phrases could suggest an uncertain belief. I think for example of the moment when the chorus sing ‘And I believe in one holy …er…um…’ and a few bars later the tenor soloist finishes off ‘…Catholic and Apostolic Church’. At any rate, the short phrases make the work less physically demanding to sing, and although there a fair number of high notes in the soprano line it is not difficult to nail them to whatever it is you nail high notes to.

Janáček also has ways of varying repeated phrases that you would never have expected. My favourite was the phrase which had an accelerando towards the end first time round, but not when it was repeated immediately afterwards. When he said that his Mass lacked ‘the sound of the usual imitative procedures’, he really meant it!

I’ll write about the actual performances in my next post.

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The Messiah in India

Posted on April 17, 2014 by vhk10

The South West Festival Chorus believes in travelling the world and followed taking Gerontius to China a few years ago with performances of the Messiah in India. We were not quite trail blazing as we were following in the footsteps of a Cambridge College choir which toured the same places (Goa and Bombay/Mumbai) last year. But we think it was the first Messiah in Goa, and the first since 1962 in Bombay.

Actually the choir didn’t resemble a typical SWFC lineup very closely, as there were some former members, friends and friends of friends, and sadly several people I know quite well intended to come and then didn’t. A knowledge of the work was assumed, so we polished it with a rehearsal on the night of our arrival in Goa and a longer one the following morning (following in my case a dip in the infinity pool and a mixed South Indian and continental breakfast).

We brought our own soloists, trumpeter and for the second performance a timpanist as well as a conductor. Our orchestra were string players from the Symphony Orchestra of India, a mixture of Indians trained in Western classical music and Eastern Europeans.

It felt a bit odd performing Messiah with a score in my hands. I realised how thoroughly I had familiarised myself with the parts I memorise each year, especially when we came to two movements BCS don’t sing and I was suddenly tied to my score again. But by looking away from the score I risked missing some of the markings we’d put in specifically for the Indian performances.

The Goan performance, in the Basilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa, really did feel exotic, with fans spinning and a crowd of interested onlookers at the open west doors. One could imagine the galleries of the building (in which St Francis Xavier is buried) populated with Portuguese colonial ladies in mantillas (or whatever Portuguese colonial ladies wore). The Bombay performance, in the National Centre for the Performing Arts concert hall on Nariman Point, seemed not so very different from a concert elsewhere.

How to cope with the sense of anti-climax on my return? Make my Royal Festival Hall début a week later.

Reviews:
Luis Dias’ blog
The Times of India

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quick on the draw in Wells

Posted on March 21, 2014 by vhk10

Just a quick note of an evensong I went to in Wells Cathedral, sung by the men and boys. A mixture of periods, with the Byrd responses, Howells in B minor and Wesley’s Wash me throughly. The Howells in particular is a favourite and seems to be gaining more of a hold in the repertoire. Howells in G, by contrast, seems to be retreating. All nicely sung so I’ll end by noting a couple of non-musical aspects of the service. One was the speed with which the collection plate came round during the final hymn – before the playover had finished! (I was on the end of a row) The other is that the kneelers are now tucked away under the seats and you have to be quite determined to use one.

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scanning the Bath Festival programme

Posted on March 16, 2014 by vhk10

We’ve just received the Bath Festival programme for 2014’s festival, and I looked through to see which concerts I might want to go to. But I was struck by three things: the shortness of the programme, the relative absence of performers whose names I recognised (other than local ones), and the lack of large-scale concerts. The only orchestral one is the Bath Phil, whom we can hear several times a year. There is no concert involving a choir, only the Abbey’s festival evensong, which is essentially a beefed-up version of what they do every week.

I’m not objecting to the jazz weekend, though I’m not qualified to comment on how good the line-up for it is. But the whole festival now consists of only 22 events spread over 11 days (excluding the ‘on tour’ events, but including the evensong and a screening of a Hitchcock film). I’m all for giving a platform to performers starting on their careers; I’ve been to a number of Festival concerts given by them in the past. But I have the impression that when it comes to attracting big names, the International Music Festival is in danger of being overtaken by the Mozartfest, which has built up relationships with the Nash Ensemble and other groups. Certainly the programme doesn’t read like one for one of the country’s principal music festivals. Possibly funds have run low, or is there a conscious attempt to rebrand it as a chamber music/crossover festival? Why are the Assembly Rooms, usually the hub of the Festival, only being used for two concerts? However, one attractive feature is the use of the Old Theatre Royal, now Bath’s Masonic Hall; I’ve never been inside and am intrigued.

(My open letter to the Artistic Director, written a couple of years ago, is here. I see that they have done something which I was in favour of: stopped calling the Festival the ‘MusicFest’ and got rid of the logo. Actually, this seems to have been done across the board for all Bath Festivals.)

P.S. This article, illustrated with a photo of my former colleagues in the Chandos Singers, may be relevant. Many festivals are now claiming a share of BANES’ limited arts budget, which must have considerably reduced the amount the International Music Festival receives.

P.P.S. A relevant blog post from the Guardian.

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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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