revisiting a work after a year

Posted on April 26, 2024 by vhk10

April has been a very quiet month musically. An early Easter in March, no Low Sunday cathedral weekend and too early for the next round of concerts. It’s mostly been rehearsals and a solitary evensong where we marked the Stanford anniversary with his canticles in C and I more or less sight-sang the alto part in Morley’s responses.

Preparations have begun for Bristol Choral Society’s next concert, Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi. After I’ve not sung it for decades, it has come round twice in as many years. There are of course great advantages in this – I don’t need to invest large amounts of time in learning it and all the work I did last year gets another payoff rather than just being expended in a single evening. (Another way of putting it – I get a chance to correct the (minor) mistakes I made last time!) I don’t get bored doing the same work twice in fairly quick succession if the music’s good enough. But the downside is that along with the notes I learnt a particular interpretation of things like tempo changes (which are many) and I’m now being asked to follow a rather different one.

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Three churches for Holy Week and Easter

Posted on April 5, 2024 by vhk10

I sang at or attended choral services in three different churches in Holy Week, including the Easter weekend. Bath Abbey Chamber Choir sang two of these services, Evensong for Palm Sunday and a Eucharist for Maundy Thursday. The novelty for me was Palestrina’s Missa Secunda, which I’d never come across before; the rest of Maundy Thursday had a French accent, with Duruflé’s Ubi Caritas and Déodat de Séverac’s Tantum Ergo.

Good Friday’s service was at Christ Church, where we sang some of our repertoire of 4-part anthems for the day, including Victoria’s setting of O vos omnes.

I changed location and went to the First Mass of Easter at Little St Mary’s in Cambridge, as well as the Easter morning Eucharist. The choir now sings significantly more and to a higher standard than when I used to sing in it, but some things don’t change, such as Stanford’s Ye Choirs of New Jerusalem. (I suppose there is the excuse that he is an anniversary composer, and there really aren’t that many good alternatives for Easter Day.)

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Verdi at the Beacon

Posted on March 25, 2024 by vhk10

Now that the Bristol Beacon is available to us, Bristol Choral Society can put on the bigger works that have been off the menu since 2018. First up was Verdi’s Requiem – a work that is thoroughly ingrained in me from multiple hearings and definitely a personal favourite, although I haven’t actually performed it all that many times.

We expanded the choir with some invited singers from other choirs. The layout of the choir stalls in the Beacon is completely different from its previous incarnation (gone altogether is the seat I always used to occupy – I used to wonder about getting a small brass plate with my name on for it). The choir stalls are now some way above the orchestra (for this concert it was the British Sinfonietta), although with bigger numbers for this concert some singers were put down near them. I don’t actually have much to say about the performance itself except that it was appreciated by our large audience (and by the reviewer in the Bristol Post).

I see that Gloucester Choral Society have the Verdi down for Spring 2025 so I may well get another pop at it before long.

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an early start for Bach

Posted on March 15, 2024 by vhk10

March was a busy month and first up was Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Gloucester Cathedral, a success to our St John Passion of 2020.

I feel I know this work very well because I’ve listened to it countless times, but I haven’t performed it often and this was only the second time I’d done it in German. And there are an awful lot of words, especially when you think of all the chorale verses. I can’t say I remembered them all that well from when I sang it eight years ago. Nor do they flow all that easily; my German is not good enough for instant comprehension and sometimes there just plain isn’t enough time for all the required sounds to be fitted in. Yes, zerbrichst, I’m looking at you, and I came off worst in the encounter with you this time.

This is the longest work in the standard choral repertoire, and the rehearsal pattern on the day had to be unusual too. The movements involving chorus were compressed into a session in the middle of the day, and then there was a break for a late lunch at the Hungry Bean (in my case). The performance began at 4 and then had a Glyndebourne-style supper interval (probably without champagne bottles chilling in the Severn) after part 1, so it didn’t end too late.

I’m happy to say that there were – for the first time in my performing history of this work – no major problems with illness, and we had the usual assembly of interesting baroque instruments courtesy of the Musical & Amicable Society (who sound a little like a financial organisation but weren’t).

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a split weekend in the Fens

Posted on February 27, 2024 by vhk10

The Cathedral Chamber Choir returned to Great St Mary’s Church in Cambridge, where our musical director is now based, this time combining it with evensong in Ely Cathedral.

Ely remained pleasantly unchanged (although I miss the poster of ground-plans of Cathedrals which used to hang in the song room). Our music combined the familiar (Bairstow’s Save us O Lord and Tomkins Responses) with dredging up memories of Noble in A minor, a setting I have only sung once before, many years ago when I was a student. I was pleased to be able to sing the full psalmody for the day.

Sunday was sung with a very different acoustic and organ (curiously, the University Church in Cambridge has two organs, one for University use and one for the parish; its Oxford equivalent has the same organ for everyone). Our Sunday morning setting was Berkeley’s Missa Brevis which I’d sung recently with the Erleigh Cantors, but as it was Lent we got to do the Kyrie which I’m not sure I’d ever done before. Our anthem was definitely new to me: Whitlock’s ‘Be still my soul’, which proved to have some rather unexpected twists in it.

At evensong, Dyson in F was dropped in favour of Moeran in D, another setting undisturbed since my student days and which was actually better than I remembered. We focused our rehearsal time on Finzi’s Welcome, sweet and sacred feast, which I have only ever sung with this choir. It was originally published alongside God is gone up and My lovely one and one might well ask why one never comes across My lovely one? Maybe it is too specific to weddings to fit into other services, but given that I’ve sung for a number of diehard Finzi fans, I’m surprised I haven’t sung it even in a concert, or even heard it.

Back to Welcome sweet and sacred feast – to me, it recalls his Magnificat in particular in places and there’s one passage which makes me wonder whether it inspired the hymn tune ‘Gonfalon Royal’. It was good to end the weekend with a large-scale but not standard work.

A personalised GSM drain cover

A personalised GSM drain cover

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Tenebrae finally make it to Bath

Posted on February 25, 2024 by vhk10

A couple of years ago Tenebrae’s Bath début was thwarted by a storm which made it unsafe to travel. They returned for this year’s Bath Bachfest, to give a concert in St Mary’s Bathwick. I bought the last ticket in the nave for what appeared to be a sell-out, with a musically knowledgeable audience around me.

The first half was one of Gesualdo’s settings of the eponymous Tenebrae service, the one for Holy Saturday. All of this was unfamiliar to me and I did my best to navigate the unfamiliar chord progressions and modulations. Sometimes I felt the composer was trying out the same ones repeatedly to experiment and find out which one worked best. The setting of O vos omnes for example, has much in common in this respect with the more famous setting which I know.

After the interval came Bach motets. After Komm, Jesu, komm came Jesu, meine Freude which was perhaps the weak link in these performances. The same ten singers sang throughout the evening, but with a five-part choir the two soprano lines didn’t quite match the volume of the lower voices. But the high point was the sparkling Singet dem Herrn which ended the concert. Here the rather rigid approach to tempi favoured by Nigel Short kept the motet motoring along briskly.

I was glad to have made it to this concert but I’m not a totally unqualified fan of Tenebrae. Despite their immaculate tuning and blend, I find there is something a little relentless and hard-edged about their performances. Difficult to put my finger on the source of this – maybe it is the inflexibility of tempi (apart from at the ends of phrases) or a sense that the blend is achieved because some of the singers are having to suppress natural warmth in their voices?

The coach was once again disgorging its passengers outside the church for this concert, and I’ve now found out where they come from. Maybe this is something other festivals, not least the Bath International Festival, could learn from; get on the radar of an organisation which organises cultural tours.

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a farewell service and Benedictus

Posted on February 13, 2024 by vhk10

For her final service at church, our priest in charge requested a setting of the Benedictus (meaning the morning canticle ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Israel’, not the movement from the Mass). This is my favourite canticle, but unless you happen to catch a Mattins service in Advent you don’t normally get to sing it. I’ve done two settings before: one by Healey Willan and the lovely one by Elgar. This time though we did a setting by Stanford (part of his service in C), ticking the anniversary-composer box. Looking at my spreadsheet of pieces I’ve sung, I see this is the 6000th item on it.

The previous weekend I sang an Evensong in Bath Abbey, with the Reading responses (these used for geographical reasons to be the Erleigh Cantors’ calling card, but I hadn’t sung them for some time), Sumsion in A and Light of the World by Elgar. This last was a first performance for me, though I have heard it on broadcasts many times.

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a vocal technique workshop

Posted on February 7, 2024 by vhk10

February began with a day in Gloucester working on vocal technique with Judith Sheridan. Lots of familiar faces from Gloucester Choral Society here, with some others. At last years Three Choirs Festival I’d been standing behind Judith at one point (I hope she wasn’t too distressed by the sounds I produced then).

I always feel I benefit from these events, if only to correct bad habits I may have got into. We learnt a lot about the physiology of singing which I appreciated, as I tend to approach technique from that direction rather than via metaphors. It was also my first time inside St Mary de Crypt Church; my musical activities are gradually taking me round Gloucester’s churches and school halls.

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a solo in the Lydian mode

Posted on January 27, 2024 by vhk10

Bath Abbey Chamber Choir sang at the wedding of one of its members, with two anthems: Parry’s I was glad and during the signing of the register, Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, in which I did the treble solo. While preparing this section, I noticed something I have not seen anyone ever comment on: it’s in the Lydian mode, using a scale of A with a D sharp throughout.

The modes never fully went away, and the Lydian mode appears in a number of pieces which are familiar to me, such as Bruckner’s motet Os Justi and the central movement of Beethoven’s A minor quartet Op. 132, and several other pieces by Britten. The opening of Bach’s much-quoted chorale melody Es ist genug also nods to it. It has an other-worldly feel; maybe that raised fourth looking heavenwards, and making you think that you’re modulating to the dominant but then you don’t. What a number of the works I mentioned have in common is the theme of contemplating God – just right for Christopher Smart’s thoughts about his cat.

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Epiphany 2024

Posted on January 15, 2024 by vhk10

The Epiphany carol service with Bath Abbey Chamber Choir has become a fixture and included a surprising number of pieces I hadn’t sung before, as well as a couple of standard ones for the season.

John Bull’s ‘Star Anthem’ was apparently once very popular but I’d never even heard of it, or realised that he wrote choral music. It contains one cadence which sounded startlingly archaic to my ears. I took one of the verse parts.

Lassus’ Omnes de Saba and Jacopus de Wert’s Vox in Rama were not pieces I’d sung before (nor in the latter case had I sung anything else by the composer). Moving into more recent compositions, I had heard Carl Rütti’s setting of I wonder as I wander many times on Christmas Eve broadcasts from King’s but never sung it, or anything else by him, and it proved reassuringly straightforward as long as you don’t listen too hard to the organ part.

Back in December I sang in a couple of other services in the Abbey, amongst other things reprising Howells in G and renewing my acquaintance with Philip Ledger’s setting of Adam lay y-bounden.

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