The muscle-memory Messiah

Posted on December 19, 2012 by vhk10

#MemorisedMessiah
Even up North they don’t do this – sing the Messiah from memory. The Bristol Choral Society do it every year, and although newcomers are offered a rather gentler way in I have decided to do it the hard way. Presumably it gets easier each year. [2015: it does]

We are doing all but four (I think) choruses. It seems very daunting when you have a score and a piano, but is easier in rehearsal. This is partly because we are brought in by our conductor, but also because hearing other parts and the harmony often guides you to where your entries are. And it’s coming in that’s usually the hardest thing to do from memory. There is also a certain amount of ‘muscle memory’ where you can recall the precise feeling of what it was like to sing the music before, down to how many beats you were silent in.

I have sung and heard the Messiah enough times to have most of the music in my head, so it is a case of slotting it into the right place, and not doing anything conspicuous at the wrong time. Some things that one might expect to be difficult are not. I had all the florid passages more or less from memory already because there are too many notes for you to read them off the page. Final cadences are deeply engrained in the memory too. I have my work cut out with Let us break their bonds asunder and Lift up your heads which are not always done; the latter of these has a split soprano part too, so I’ve done my part even less often. Of the movements which are always performed, I think that the chorus I find hardest to memorise is He trusted in God which I never feel I sing confidently even with a score!

Review in Bachtrack

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A service with 12 anthems

Posted on December 19, 2012 by vhk10

I moonlighted (is that the correct past tense?) on Advent Sunday by singing an Advent carol service at another local church whose organist is leaving at the end of the month. The choir was expanded with several singers who’ve joined for big services over the years, and drew on repertoire that the choir had toured Tuscany with in the summer, themed around the Church year. So the emphasis in the service was on Advent Sunday as the Church’s ‘New Year’s Day’, with carefully chosen Bible readings.

I don’t think I’ve ever sung a service with so many anthems in. As well as some standards and favourites of this particular choir, there were a couple that were new to me: Victoria’s Pueri Hebraeorum and Gabrieli’s Hodie completi sunt. Despite this, we put the service together on one big rehearsal (with another optional one earlier) and it was well received.

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seasonal music at the ballet

Posted on December 13, 2012 by vhk10

Thanks to my bank, my daughter and I enjoyed a night out at the Northern Ballet Theatre’s production of Beauty and the Beast. It was the first time I’d been to the ballet for many years, and rather than one of the standards, we saw a recently created ballet with a score made out of existing music, mostly played live and complementing the action well. There was the diversion of identifying the pieces without having previously looked them up in the programme. They were mostly French, including Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and, more strikingly, part of Poulenc’s Organ Concerto. Something that totally floored me was extracts from The Seasons by Glazunov. Vivaldi is the only composer really to have nailed this theme. Others who’ve had a go include Tchaikovsky and Haydn, but the results aren’t among their greatest works.

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Mozartfest 2012 (3): what others in the family heard

Posted on December 13, 2012 by vhk10

Here’s a quick run-down of what other family members went to in the Bath Mozartfest 2012.

My husband went to a lunchtime recital by Gautier Capuçon (cello) and Gabriela Montero. As well as works by Beethoven and Schumann, this included a rarity, the sonata in A minor by Grieg which was well worth listening to.

The Sitkovetsky Piano Trio returned on the Wednesday evening, playing Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven (the Archduke trio). As before, he was especially impressed with their pianist, Wu Qian. Review here.

The last event was a concert in the Forum with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Hannu Lintu. This had the usual problem with the Forum’s unsuitability as a concert hall – the orchestra feels miles away and the audience as a result lose engagement with the performance. The concert began with the Bath Camerata joining the orchestra for Schumann’s Nachtlied – a rarity, and deservedly so in the opinion of family members, though it was well sung. Things looked up when Angela Hewitt returned (with her Fazioli) to play Mozart’s piano concerto in C minor and the concert ended with a satisfactory account of the Pathétique Symphony. Review in Bath Chronicle here.

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Mozartfest 2012 (2): Alisdair Beatson and the Jerusalem Quartet

Posted on December 12, 2012 by vhk10

I went to two more concerts in the Mozartfest. Firstly Alisdair Beatson played a song-inspired programme in the Guildhall. The centrepiece was Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy. I’m not sure I’d ever heard this live before. It was played with great vigour and virtuosity, though the quieter passages also came over with a lovely sense of line. The recital opened with Mozart’s variations on Gluck’s “Unser dummer Pöbel meint” K 455, and continued with Liszt’s arrangements of Du bist die Ruh’ and Gretchen am Spinnrade and Schumann’s Widmung. The encore was a Valse-Caprice by Fauré, unkown to me. Overall the emphasis was on fluency and tempi were on the fast side.

Another blogger reviews the recital here.

Later I was present at the Jerusalem Quartet’s Saturday morning concert, having been offered a press seat as compensation for the missed advertised benefits of Friendship of the Mozartfest. I enjoy Saturday morning as a time-slot, perhaps because I feel more alert then than on, say, a weekday evening. The concert opened with a relative rarity, Wolf’s Italian Serenade, a piece which is rather hard to place if you don’t know who wrote it. Paul Meyer joined them for Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, complementing the sound of the quartet admirably, rather than turning the piece into a scaled down clarinet concerto as some performers like to do. The concert ended with Brahms’ quartet in B flat. What one really gets from this quartet is overall beauty of sound and a complete balance between the players. The large though not capacity audience loved it.

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The Art of Fugue on a Fazioli

Posted on December 8, 2012 by vhk10

We went to hear Angela Hewitt make one of her fairly frequent visits to Bath to give a recital in the Mozartfest. Last time I went she moved some distance from her usual stomping ground of Bach; this time she was well and truly immersed in it, with the second half of the recital being no.s 1-10 from The Art of Fugue.

I went to a pre-recital ‘conversation’ with Prof. Jonathan Cross, in which the choice of programme was explained and illustrated. In fact the conversation framework was abandoned after a while, and Angela Hewitt played us extracts from the fugues and explained what was going on in each one. She also explained her choice of instrument, a Fazioli which can produce a wide range of tone for a skilled player.

The first half contained some arrangements of Bach by Wilhelm Kempff, followed by Beethoven’s Op. 101 sonata (which I last heard, in the same place, in an arrangement for string sextet). These were all ably performed although in some sense they were antipasti.

We both thought that we couldn’t easily take in that much fugal complexity all in one go, because this is a demanding work to listen to as well. I can’t say that my concentration held up perfectly, and I realised that The Art of Fugue is much revered but is far from familiar repertoire.

What difference did the Fazioli make? I’m not sure that this is the best repertoire to show it to its best advantage. In particular, I thought that runs sounded less crisp than they would have done on a standard-issue Steinway. This is not so much of a drawback given that Angela Hewitt’s interpretative style tends, by modern standards, to the romantic. She wound down by playing some Gluck as an encore.

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Singing by numbers

Posted on November 22, 2012 by vhk10

So I’ve had my audition. This choir uses a system I hadn’t encountered before: you are marked by the musical director in various categories and this is distilled into a single score out of 10, which you are told. I won’t reveal what mine was, but it was enough to get me into the choir. (I’m not sure what difference it made that my sight-singing wasn’t actually tested – I’m confident it would not have let me down if it had been.)

Now while it seems rather reductive to have one’s entire vocal abilities and musicianship reduced to a single digit, there is an advantage to doing auditions this way. It at least gives an objective basis for reducing the choir, should smaller numbers be required, rather than the arbitrary methods that are often used.

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Note clusters in Ely

Posted on November 19, 2012 by vhk10

I made a swift return to Ely Cathedral, this time for a weekend of services with the Erleigh Cantors. We weren’t able to do introits and we weren’t at full strength, because it wasn’t half-term for some people, so our programme was a cautious one. Sumsion featured strongly, with his Canticles in A and Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace.

The scrunchy notes were in Lux Aurumque by Eric Whitacre, which we slipped in as a Communion motet. Also in a chant by Richard Marlow adapted from Purcell’s Jehova, although more in the spirit of the anthem with some quotations of snatches of melody and similar harmonies, rather than a strict transcription.

Our mass setting was the Missa di San Marco by Ronald Corp, which was in places rather more aggressively rhythmical than other music I’ve sung by him. Other music included Purcell’s canticles in G minor and O clap your hands by Rutter.

I particularly enjoyed something I tend to take for granted on many Cathedral weekends: the organ voluntaries. David Pether played a piece by Merkel (a composer unknown to me) and Franck’s Chorale in A minor, a great war-horse and a particular favourite of mine which seems not to come round so much these days.

With the exception of a New Year weekend once in this same Cathedral, this was the coldest such weekend I’ve sung in. I’m told this is because the heat in the building would escape when the West doors are thrown open for the Remembrance Sunday parade, so it is not turned on till mid-November. Visiting choirs take note!

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Bath gains a music shop

Posted on November 13, 2012 by vhk10

Early last year Bath lost its sheet music shop. Now it is about to regain one, as Music Dynamics are expanding from their base in Stroud and about to open a shop in Broad St. It’s a shame it wasn’t open for the Mozartfest, but it clearly won’t be long before it’s ready for business.

The website claims they have ‘One of Europe’s largest collection of vocal scores and choral performance CDs’. I hope that they will have someone on their staff who is knowledgeable about church music. I once tried to buy a setting of the Evening Canticles in this shop’s predecessor, only to be served by someone who didn’t know what the term meant and refused to find someone who did, saying ‘It’s a bit specialised’! Never mind ‘the customer is always right’, isn’t a music shop where you’d expect people to know about musical specialisms? And some churches do have significant music budgets!

A display area for forthcoming local events and groups would also be welcome. Bath Compact Discs now has one (it stopped doing so before it moved, because the posters fell down and set off the burglar alarm), but it’s not very large.

I will certainly be through the doors soon after it opens with a checklist of things to test it against.

[I have now been in. There is a small noticeboard you can attach flyers to. But the only choral scores I saw were a few Carols for Choirs. Overall their stock is rather similar to MusicRoom in Bristol, though their shop is not as large as Music Room.]

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choir emails

Posted on November 12, 2012 by vhk10

I’ve had two opposing experiences with choir emails recently.

One was a list created for a concert I was at one time interested in singing in. I received a 6MB message from this list, almost all of it being a photo taken by the conductor of a cloud whose shape had amused her. At this point I read her the riot act about bandwidth. People who read email on mobile phones might have to pay dearly for a message like that! (Of course you can opt not to download attachments automatically, but many people don’t do this). [I’ve just had another similar email from a different person, consisting of nearly 2MB of flyer for someone else’s recital, in TIFF format(!)]

The other came after missing a couple of rehearsals with another choir. I turned up for the next rehearsal raring to go, only to find the venue locked and empty. It turned out that it had been cancelled and announcements made at the rehearsals I missed. I wasn’t on the choir email list because I hadn’t yet auditioned. Now I realise that keeping probationary singers off the main email list is nice and tidy for admin purposes, but if they don’t receive vital information like this it risks alienating the people you’re trying to attract. (I have since had an apology that my voice rep hadn’t noticed that I wouldn’t have have had the announcement about the cancelled rehearsal).

Choirs vary tremendously in their degree of use of email. Real die-hards who don’t use it at all (such as the late Eric Rosebery) are rare now, but there are still some directors who think that an email is a blank message with a Microsoft Word document attached. Others love bombarding your mailbox not only with info about their choir, but about numerous others.

These observations about email don’t just apply to choirs of course but somehow they seem particularly applicable here. Maybe it’s because choir email lists give you a chance to send email to lots of people at once, with associated scope for mishap.

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Friendship but no food

Posted on October 24, 2012 by vhk10

Last year my family thought making me a ‘Friend’ of the Bath Mozartfest would be a nice birthday present. The privileges included early booking, a free programme and an invitation to the ‘Friends’ and Patrons’ Lunch’, and they thought the last would be something I’d particularly appreciate as a chance to socialise with other music lovers (the intervals of Festival concerts are often not very good for doing this). But for reasons we never understood, the Festivals Box Office wouldn’t allow them to do so when they tried, as I recorded here.

This year they made a second attempt to do so and succeeded. I received a letter saying that I was a Friend of this year’s Festival and reminding me about the early booking and the free programme. The 2011 festival programme listed the benefits of becoming a Friend of the Mozartfest, which included an invitation to the ‘Friends’ and Patrons’ lunch’, above the application form. I was looking forward to hearing about the date of this social event for Friends, but on enquiry I find there isn’t going to be one this year ‘because there are other social events’ (to which, however, Friends are not automatically invited).

Now I realise that the point of being a Friend is to support the Festival financially, and that if my family had read the small print on the online application form (as opposed to the form in the 2011 programme) they would have found that the terms had changed in 2012, but I can’t help thinking it’s sneaky to quietly withdraw like this a significant benefit of Friendship that had been offered for some years, and to remove the social component altogether. Maybe a sponsor had pulled out or for some other reason the cost of lunch was unsustainable, but surely a less expensive alternative such as a drinks reception, or even coffee and cake at a Saturday morning concert, could have been arranged instead? Or the cost of the lowest level of Friendship reduced? In any case, once the lunch has been advertised in the 2011 festival programme as a benefit of 2012 Friendship alongside an application form, isn’t the Festival obliged to honour the deal, or at least provide some equivalent benefit?

Anyway there are still plenty of tickets for most of the best Festival concerts, though the ECO concert is sold out. Probably because it is in the Assembly Rooms, which can’t leave that much space for an audience. This is where the lack of a concert hall in Bath of the size of (say) the Wiltshire Music Centre makes itself felt.

[November 13th: I claimed my free programme at the Assembly Rooms last night, though not without difficulty as the programme distributors didn’t have instructions to give them to Friends of the Mozartfest. But in the programme a invitation to the ‘annual Friends’ and Patrons’ lunch’ is listed as among the benefits of Friendship. Have I just been unlucky in being a Friend in the one year when there wasn’t a lunch? And do they realise that what they say and do to a blogger gets around? ]

[The answer is that the lunch shouldn’t have been advertised and was dropped because very few people went to it. Probably this is the known Bathonian tendency to avoid mixing with people you don’t already know. It is all very well to say ‘you can eat with your friends after the concerts’ but that hasn’t happened to me in 15 years of going to the Mozartfest!]

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at the Exultate Singers 10th anniversary reunion

Posted on October 13, 2012 by vhk10

It was fortunate that this concert was when it was, as almost any other weekend around now would have not allowed me to take part. I was invited back to join in some pieces in the concert in St. James’s Priory church in Bristol. Last time I sang there the church was about to be refurbished, and it now looks impressive in a rather austere sort of way (although the information boards somehow elide the centuries of Anglicanism in its history).

There were just a few of us ‘extras’ and I expected there to be more, but I think many of the former members of the choir were students who’ve moved away. I’ve never really found a replacement for this choir, and I didn’t want to leave it, so it was good to be temporarily part of it again. I hope that there might be future occasions when it is expanded, rather as Bath Camerata sometimes invites former members back for its Good Friday concerts. This particular concert was a special occasion and we also all enjoyed a party on the previous evening.

Some of the pieces I sang were very familiar, others less so. Among the latter was The Hills by John Ireland, which I once encountered many years ago (it was proposed as an anthem, though would be suitable only for somewhere like St. James’s Piccadilly). I would never have thought that Ireland could have set words by James Kirkup; I pigeon-hole composer and poet in totally different time periods, but it turns out Ireland did write a few pieces after 1940 and this piece dates from the early 1950’s.

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