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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A long day at the Proms

Posted on September 23, 2013 by vhk10

Saturday August 17th was a marathon as there were two Proms to go to. We arrived earlier than we needed to and found ourselves near the head of the queue, which put us among some of the hard-core queuers. This provided some entertaining conversations to overhear, such as the one between an unreconstructed Marxist and an unimpressed Eastern European.

The first Prom was the CBSO under Andris Nelsons with Nelsons’ wife Kristīne Opolais as soloist. The opening work was Dvořák’s 8th Symphony, which is curiously unfamiliar to me. I was surprised at how relatively unmelodic it was for a piece by this composer, especially in the first two movements. Nelsons’ conducting style is extravagant, with his occasional vocalising audible to us near the front of the Arena! After the interval we enjoyed the operatic scenas of Desdemona’s Willow Song and Ave Maria and Tatyana’s Letter Scene (preceded by the Onegin Polonaise). Opolais was particularly good at floated quiet high notes. I am enough of a theatre person to miss at least having some props, though. Finally came Strauss’ Emperor Waltz and Thunder and Lightning Polka and for a moment I was able to imagine the Arena transformed into a ballroom and full of whirling couples.

After a break for food we returned for the second concert (the cloakroom ticket system ensures that those who were at the first Prom are first in the queue for the second one). This was Marin Alsop (whose conducting style is the polar opposite of Andris Nelsons’) and the OAE performing Brahms and Schumann. The Tragic Overture passed rather uneventfully as a curtain-raiser, but things really came alight for Schumann’s Fourth Symphony which was full of drama and beautifully played.

The main work, however was the German Requiem, with OAE’s own choir of youngish singers and soloists Rachel Harnisch and Hank Neven. This was another fine performance, but I had a couple of reservations about the choir. One was that the ATB sang with a full tone but the soprano sound was rather white by comparison. A consequence of the age of the singers, no doubt. The other was that the choir never sang really quietly (the exception being Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit, when they were sitting down), so the full dynamic range of the work wasn’t explored.

Reviews were not numerous – the papers seem to have given up reviewing all Promenade concerts.
Prom 46:

Prom 47:

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a wedding at Redcliffe

Posted on September 11, 2013 by vhk10

I hadn’t sung at St. Mary Redcliffe for a few years, the last time being my first Exultate Singers concert. I was invited back to join the choir for a wedding. I think that since I last sang there the organ has had a rebuild; it certainly sounded good anyway. I had plenty of opportunity to admire the (considerable) architectural splendour of this church, as the bride arrived 40 minutes late (the delay being something to do with her make-up). We performed an anthem by Handel and some hymns, craning over one another’s orders of service for the words as there were only a limited number for the choir (choirs at weddings don’t need the expensive shell, but we do need the insert with the words of the hymns in!). Despite this it was a pleasant change to be a guest singer at another church, and we don’t have very many weddings at ours, though one is promised for next year.

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great composers in Chichester

Posted on August 11, 2013 by vhk10

It has taken the Erleigh Cantors a long time to get round to visiting Chichester Cathedral, but we made our debut appearance at the end of July.  It was an intensive weekend with some notable but taxing pieces by major composers.

The main piece that was new to me was Poulenc’s Exultate Deo which starts off in a way reminiscent of Palestrina’s setting of the same text, but rapidly becomes almost percussive in style, with many discrete changes in dynamic level.  Despite looking daunting at first, it soon fell into place in rehearsal.  Perhaps this is what happens with music by a great composer – there’s no feeling that it would not matter much if the notes were slightly different, rather they are the best that they can be, which reduces the temptation to sing something else.

The other new piece was When I survey the wondrous Cross by Edgar Day. This was charmingly retro – although I think it dates from the mid-20th century, it could easily have been written seventy years earlier. It’s quite long and thickly scored. We reprised Gabrieli’s Jubilate Deo from our recent concert. Schütz’ German Magnificat is familiar to me from previous performances, but wasn’t to everybody. I hadn’t done God is gone up by Finzi for ages, and I don’t think I’d ever sung the 2nd soprano part before. Our music also included Howells’ Coll. Reg. Te Deum and Jubilate (the Jubilate being much less familiar to me), Holst’s Nunc Dimittis, Stanford in A and the rather infrequently performed but mostly straightforward Missa Capellae Regalis by Anthony Caesar. Added to all of this were generous amounts of psalmody (including all 6 for the 27th evening!) which we coped with admirably. A packed programme, so it was probably a good thing we didn’t add any introits.

We were well looked after by the Cathedral (good to see that the ‘voice of Chichester’ is still there!), who arranged for us to have Sunday lunch together in a room within the refectory, to help with the tight turnaround. I stayed in George Bell House, a conference centre/B & B run by the Cathedral, which I recommend, not least because it is in the Close! We rehearsed in the lovely song room, which features one of the more eccentric Cathedral fire escape arrangements, rather reminiscent of the door in Being John Malkovich.

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in which the rest of the family listens to Piazzolla

Posted on August 7, 2013 by vhk10

Actually I think it was just my husband who did so – he went to a recital at the Wigmore Hall by Bernanda Fink and her brother Marcos (accompanied by Anthony Spiri), singing a polyglot selection of songs. The novelty was some Slovenian songs which were pleasant enough but could have been written several decades earlier then they were, which was in about the 1930’s. ‘A sort of Slovenian Roger Quilter’.

In July he went to a recital by Samara Ginsberg and Leo Nicholson at the Pump Room under the aegis of the Bath Recital Artists’ Trust, which also included some Piazzolla.

In July others in the family also went to Prom 23 (my daughter’s first time in the Arena) and heard Daniel Harding with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra perform lots of music in C.  Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music shaded without a break into Schumann’s Second Symphony, in an account which didn’t really make much of a case for it.  In the second half Paul Lewis played Mozart’s K503 piano concerto and the concert ended with Sibelius 7.  The Mozart concerto also seemed rather bland, but the Sibelius was better.

In another family development, my elder son got a merit in Grade 1 trumpet!

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So what next?

Posted on August 2, 2013 by vhk10

To celebrate singing in all 42 Cathedrals I had a party with a rather special cake:

Cathedral cake

Cathedral cake


Not surprisingly, I’ve been asked several times what my next ambition is. I don’t have anything definite, as it’s nice after all these years to feel I’m not chasing round the country to meet a target. But there are some things it would be nice to do, some of which really ought to be easier than singing in forty-two Cathedrals.

a) Anglican Cathedrals in Wales. I’ve sung in two of the six, and would happily accept, or even arrange visits to any of the remaining four (Bangor, St. Asaph, St. Woolos, Brecon).
b) Singing in the Royal Albert Hall. Ideally this would be at a Promenade concert, but failing that there is the Really Big Chorus. A neighbour is also interested in this venture and I might join him.
c) Singing in the Lord Mayor’s Chapel in Bristol, either at a service or in a concert with the Chapel Singers. I’m on the dep list, which in theory ought to mean I get invited to join the Singers’ concerts.

I have some other interesting venues lined up in the spring, so watch this space.

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