Mozartfest 2013 – 2

Posted on December 3, 2013 by vhk10

On the Tuesday evening I was back in the Assembly rooms with our youngest for the Trio Wanderer, a French ensemble who played Mozart’s K502, Ravel’s piano trio and Schubert’s D898 in poised yet expressive performances. This was my son’s first proper adult concert (he stayed for just the first half) and he listened intently. The Ravel was new to me and is a curious mix: everything from Basque dances to Malay pantoum to a passacaglia.

This concert deserved to have been better attended. I particularly appreciated the instinctive understanding the three players had of each other’s timing, born of long association with one another.

Earlier my husband went to hear Elizabeth Watts and Roger Vignoles in a recital of songs to texts by Goethe and da Ponte. Composers ranged from the well-known to the obscure (though Stephen Storace has featured here before); they were all served well and the various heroines appropriately characterised. Her encore was a wordless version of Mozart’s Rondo alla turca, for which you really ‘had to be there’ to appreciate the acting she put into it.

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Mozartfest 2013 – 1

Posted on November 27, 2013 by vhk10

We managed to fit in several concerts in this years’s Bath Mozartfest. We began on the Sunday night with Anthony Marwood (violin) and Aleksandar Madžar (piano) in the Assembly Rooms. This was quite a popular concert, which opened with Schumann’s Op. 105 sonata (unknown to me) and continued with Mozart’s K526 and Beethoven’s Kreutzer. We found Marwood a little on the bland side, less so in the Schumann; the accompaniment had more colour. And the slow movement of the Kreutzer seemed rather rushed.

Confectionery enthusiasts noted the absence of piano bars on sale in the interval alongside Mozartkugeln, and the availability of tubs of Marshfield ice cream for those prepared to seek it out.

The following day my husband went to hear Leonard Elschenbroich (cello) and Wu Qian (piano) in a lunchtime programme of Schumann, Debussy and Beethoven. He has admired Wu Qian’s playing since hearing her in the Sitkovetsky piano trio and wasn’t disappointed this time. The concert got a good writeup in the Bath Chronicle.

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Duruflé’s Requiem (2): Bath

Posted on November 26, 2013 by vhk10

The second performance of the Requiem came a week later, at our Remembrance Sunday service. We would not normally do an entire Mass setting, but we were playing host to a visiting choir, conducted by a former organist who now works in Denmark, and mixing Danish singers with some from Bristol, where he also used to conduct a choir. Several of the regular Christ Church singers joined them in singing the Duruflé.

We sang all of the Requiem apart from the Offertory, using some movements to replace hymns. I had to adjust considerably, not only to performing in a much smaller space (and with some different tempi) but also to the rather purer Nordic sound.

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Duruflé’s Requiem (1): Winchester

Posted on November 18, 2013 by vhk10

It’s been nine years since I sang Duruflé’s Requiem which was something of a cult piece when I was a student. And then I am invited to take part in two performances with different choirs in the space of nine days. The first of these was part of a weekend with the Erleigh Cantors (and Philip Aspden on the organ) in Winchester Cathedral – a rather special weekend, because rather than just celebrating the Nth Sunday after Trinity we had the privilege of singing at the Eucharists for All Souls and All Saints (the latter transferred to the Sunday, so they came in reverse order).

The All Souls’ service, sung in a dimly-lit nave, was very atmospheric and I think we did the Duruflé justice. We performed it in its entirety and in order (though the Libera Me got accidentally displaced and was sung immediately before the In Paradisum).

Our setting for the Sunday Eucharist was Jackson in G, which was a standard setting in my Cambridge student days, I think probably because it goes well in a traditional-language service. At any rate, it has stayed embedded in my memory. Other Sunday music included some other relatively unfamiliar pieces: Jonathan Dove’s I will lift up mine eyes (hard work to sing this one, with its long, sustained high notes), Byrd’s O quam gloriosum (one of the less often performed pieces in the Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems) and Richard Drakeford’s Vaughan Williams-esque canticles in E minor. These are no longer in the repertoire even at Worcester College Oxford (for whose choir they were written); everyone I know who has sung them seems to have done so because of a link to Judy Martin.

We had good-sized and appreciative congregations, including some people I knew, and it was good to chat to them about the music afterwards.

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Cavalli’s Argonauts

Posted on November 18, 2013 by vhk10

Some of the duller evenings of my life have been caused by Cavalli’s Messa Concertata, as performer and audience. I was therefore slightly hesitant about spending an evening at one of his operas. However, I was at a loose end, and the opera Giasone (or Jason as it became in English) is one of the rare ones that deals with the Argo’s voyage, the subject of my one-time PhD thesis. (Jason’s subsequent problems with Medea have been rather more popular. The only one about the voyage itself that comes to mind is a lost early work by Mahler.) English Touring Opera were performing it at Bath’s Theatre Royal.

The liberties taken with Greek legend were indeed great. The plot brings the two main love intrigues in the story together; Jason and Medea are married with her father’s blessing (!), but are blown off course on their return to Colchis and arrive back at Lemnos where Jason has abandoned not only Hypsipyle (renamed Isiphile here) but a whole family. The plot resolves after various twists and turns, involving some low-life comic relief and a rejected suitor of Medea (!)

The music is certainly more interesting than the Messa Concertata‘s, but what I found lacking was ensemble singing – mostly the characters just sang arias at one another and only occasionally did two voices sound at once. This was partly the fault of the libretto. Opportunities for dramatic confrontations were also missed – if I (or Handel) had been running the show, Isiphile and Medea would have had a good old spat at some point, and indeed Medea was rather under-characterised throughout. (The singer playing her had a rather disconcerting resemblance to the Duchess of Cambridge). Heracles made a brief appearance and gives a version of his speech on Lemnos from Argonautica 1, but is also under-used. Jason however emerges as even more of a rat than he is in Apollonius or Euripides.

It was all competently performed, but I don’t think this opera, popular though it was in its day, would make converts to baroque opera. But it beats his Mass anyway.

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John Tavener RIP

Posted on November 13, 2013 by vhk10

#tavenerrip

Some of us heard the Song for Athene playing in the dentist’s surgery yesterday, and this turned out to be because Sir John Tavener had died. I predict an Christmas outbreak of performances of The Lamb and perhaps also his beautiful Hymn to the Mother of God (which I only sung for the first time quite recently. I suspect that after that we’ll hear rather less Tavener, because composers tend to fall out of the repertoire immediately after they die, when they no longer tick the box of ‘contemporary music’. And then if they are lasting, they have a revival a few years later. Michael Tippett seems to be having such a revival, but Lennox Berkeley’s music (for example) has not returned in the quantities in which it was heard in the 1980’s, when he was still alive though no longer composing new pieces.

I’ve sung the standard pieces by Tavener that are in the church music repertoire, with the exception of God is with Us, which is in the repertoire at church so some chance that I’ll get to do it. Apart from that, I don’t think there is anything by him on my wishlist. The main piece of ‘holy minimalism’ that is is Pärt’s Magnificat.

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back at WNO

Posted on November 8, 2013 by vhk10

So it was back to the Millennium Centre in Cardiff a couple of weeks after our previous visit. On death row, the condemned prisoner is reminiscing about the good times while elsewhere frantic efforts are made to secure their release. But to no avail, and the characters must rely on Judgement Day to vindicate them. No, we weren’t back for another performance of Tosca – this time it was Anna Bolena.

There is a real trend for monochrome productions at the moment, such as the ROH Lulu and WNO’s own Carmen. This particular production also featured a revolving stage, though often it seemed to be used simply because it was there rather than to achieve a particular effect.

It was all well sung and acted, even by the singer who had apparently got a throat infection according to the pre-performance apology. But we had the impression that the performances succeeded in spite of the production rather than because of it. There was also the usual WNO awkwardness in handling the chorus, and not even some nice lighting changes to give the sense of time passing.

I enjoy bel canto music, but have difficulty handling the plots. In Donizetti’s version of British history, Anna’s downfall comes about because she has the misfortune to get involved with a couple of prize plonkers, Smeaton and Lord Percy. I realise it’s a convention of the genre, but I still find the mad scenes (always involving women) a bit hard to take. Can’t a woman face execution with resolution and/or defiance? For me the definitive death-row final scene has to be Andrea Chénier.

Naomi’s review:

http://dolcesuono.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/anna-bolena-at-wno/

Some published reviews:

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Remembering the War Requiem

Posted on October 29, 2013 by vhk10

@bristolchoral
The War Requiem is associated with remembrance, which is why it gets so many performances at this time of year, especially in these years of the centenaries of Britten and the outbreak of the Great War. But I am going to discuss a more practical aspect of remembering. I sang the War Requiem a few years ago and thought that I would recall it easily when preparing it again, but it’s proved a lot harder than I expected. There are various reasons:

Firstly, I’m not singing exactly the same notes as last time. There are several passages that are new to me, which add up to quite a bit of extra music, because:

  • I am singing 2nd soprano this time, whereas before I was first
  • In one performance we are all singing the semi-chorus section, which I didn’t sing before. (The previous semichorus also sang the Recordare section). These sections are among the harder ones.
  • Some sopranos are reinforcing some of the alto entries.

Also, the previous performance was rehearsed intensively, and I think that some passages just have not stuck in the memory. These include some that are being taken faster this time (such as the ‘Quam olim Abrahae’ fugues) and so require greater familiarity than I needed before.

Finally, I don’t think I was note perfect last time. I suspect I ‘winged it’ a bit with the help of doubling from the orchestra and soprano soloist, and I know I came unstuck in the Libera Me, which is an order of magnitude harder than anything else. (I ought to get on with it as it is a tribute to Berg, but that doesn’t make it any easier to sing!) I’m sure I didn’t get every last tone and semitone the right way round, but that is what is expected this time!

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the importance of publicity

Posted on October 15, 2013 by vhk10

I have a stack of flyers and a couple of posters for my next concert and must distribute the remainder in appropriate places. I feel very guilty when I find publicity after a concert that I never got round to giving out.

All too often I’ve been in a choir that has performed ‘away’ and got a very disappointing audience because there was not enough local advertising for it. It can’t be emphasised enough how important this is. Recently a distinguished choir performed in a local church, in an area where a large number of music lovers live. Their carefully themed programme was promoted by a poster with a complex design, produced in several sizes at I would imagine significant expense and effort. The church only received posters a few days beforehand – too late for the congregation to see them when they came to church on Sunday – and late in the afternoon on the day of the concert choir members were seen asking for posters to be displayed in local shops (there having been none before). As at least two people connected with the choir lived near the church, it would not have been hard to get one of them to distribute some publicity a couple of weeks beforehand.

So I’ll make an offer here. If you are putting on a choir concert in lower Lansdown, and need some publicity to be done, I am willing to help get posters into local businesses, and/or to put flyers through the doors of known local music lovers. I would only ask in return that if I am on your books as a singer who is available to boost numbers, (for example because I have sung with you in the past) that I remain there and perhaps get an invitation to sing at an appropriate point in the future.

I’m singing Duruflé’s Requiem a couple of times in early November and I make my annual appeal. If you encounter vocal scores of this work stamped as belonging to St. John’s Bathwick, the church is waiting for them to be returned, as they were borrowed some years back and haven’t been seen since. It is as wrong to hold on to this set of scores as it would be to steal silver from the church worth over £200 (the cost of replacement). They can be left at either of the Bathwick churches, no questions asked. No one would want in their choir library music which rightfully belonged elsewhere.

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two free tickets to Tosca

Posted on October 15, 2013 by vhk10

I won a couple of tickets to Welsh National Opera’s Tosca via a competition on Twitter! This allowed us to go to a performance in Cardiff, with front-row seats in the circle and champagne and nibbles also available courtesy of Lanson who sponsored the production.

Tosca was in fact the first opera I ever went to, in a Glyndebourne touring production in Oxford.

The staging was faithful to the period, although I thought the costumes perhaps dated from a slightly later one, and the portrait was definitely in the wrong style, and so large that it was hard to avoid looking at it! The usual beautifully graded WNO lighting change happened at dawn in Act 3.

All the roles were well sung, although Cavaradossi didn’t have quite as much punch at the top as we’d have liked. If you want more detail, my daughter has written it up in her blog. One oddity was that the offstage shepherd boy at the opening of Act 3 was apparently sung by an adult singer, which didn’t really work. Perhaps they have had similar problems to those which prevented a boy alto soloist singing on the Last Night of the Proms this year. And while the chorus were in good voice, they still moved like people who’d been told to be in precise positions at any given moment (as did Tosca at times).

The evening ended with the most enthusiastic curtain call I’ve ever seen at an opera – a positive hokey-cokey!

As this was a revival it didn’t get many reviews but here are a couple:

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Don’t eat during Prom 68

Posted on October 8, 2013 by vhk10

The Proms season was early this year – looking at our collection of prospectuses we found that it has sometimes ended over a week later in recent years. We returned on Monday of the final week to hear Vasily Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic in a programme of music by Russian and Polish composers.

First up was Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony. I think that well performed this has its moments, but somehow it didn’t quite take off. It didn’t help that a large number of the audience arrived during the performance. Of course it is hard to know what to do when the first piece on the programme is long, and the end of the first movement is the first opportunity to admit latecomers, but there were an awful lot of them. Generally, this audience provided a lot of distraction – for example, I was near someone who brought her interval ice-cream back into the hall and finished eating it (scraping her spatula noisily round the carton) during the second half. Someone else was sharing a Ritter Sport bar in a crinkly wrapper with their companion during the music. And so on.

Szymanowski’s first violin concerto was played by Baiba Skride. This was a fine performance, which almost but not quite sold the piece to me. But it is a little too much generic early 20th century in its sound world – somewhere I missed picking up on the composer’s individual voice.

The second half was Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. I like these the most of his orchestral works – the point at which his orchestral style meets his church music, as he quotes a doxology from one of the settings in his Vespers. This quotation ‘overcomes’ a preceding allusion to the Dies Irae plainchant, much as the Russian anthem drives back the French one in the 1812 Overture. I enjoyed this performance, though there was some controversy about the very end of it. The encore was a piece by Geirr Tveitt.

Reviews:

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Health and safety at Canterbury

Posted on September 26, 2013 by vhk10

The Cathedral Chamber Choir was at Canterbury for their summer week this year. We rehearsed in All Saints’ Chapel because the song room was unavailable for ‘health and safety reasons’. As one of our singers fell on the steps leading to the chapel and broke her leg in two places, I hate to think how dangerous the song room itself must be. A more welcome change, also for health and safety reasons, was that the choir no longer has to build its own stalls for the Nave Eucharist (something no other cathedral made you do!)

I joined the choir for the latter part of the week, staying at Lanfranc House nearby. There was nothing new to me in the music (and a disappointingly small amount of psalmody), but a welcome opportunity to renew my acquaintance with some pieces I hadn’t sung for a while: Byrd’s Second Service, Francis Jackson’s Evening Canticles in G and O sing unto the Lord by Purcell (paired with his canticles in G minor). Purcell seems a bit out of favour these days – the only reason I can think of being a swing away from him after his quatercentenary in 2009.

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