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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Prom 57: a sprint from Ely

Posted on October 13, 2012 by vhk10

Somehow I managed to get away after 4 p.m. evensong at Ely Cathedral, made it to the railway station, leapt onto another train at Cambridge and then arrived at the Albert Hall around 7 o’clock to be there for the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester’s Prom under Daniele Gatti. A print-your-own-ticket facility ensured I had a seat waiting for me, though curiously my (minimal but not non-existent) 3 days’ worth of luggage didn’t get checked. Part of it was my academic gown, which I wore as I went in. Quite a rush, but that is me: Cathedral singer by day, Berg enthusiast by night.

What I’d come to hear was Frank Peter Zimmermann playing the violin concerto, as part of a concert with a loosely Viennese theme. Some of the concert was made up of opera excerpts: it began with some chunks of Parsifal, like the Prom I went to two years ago. And after the interval came the suite from Der Rosenkavalier, which somehow manages to neutralise the attractiveness of the music, especially by its unsubtle replacement of Strauss’ wry original ending with a reprise of one of the big themes.

These pieces were all played with lovely tone and great clarity; the only flaw I noticed was occasional mis-tuning in the brass. The interpretation of Berg’s concerto was on the restrained side (as seems to be common these days), allowing the score to speak for itself rather than being overly demonstrative.

The final piece on the programme was Ravel’s La valse which gradually emerged as a brutal cousin of the Rite of Spring or the second of Berg’s 3 Orchestral Pieces. Sadly I needed to dash off again afterwards to be sure of making my train and so missed what I’m told was a fine performance of the prelude to Meistersinger.

This was generally thought to be one of the best of this year’s Promenade concerts. Proms audiences seem to have been more beset by coughs than ever (perhaps it’s the cold, wet summer), but even the apparently more inattentive fell silent and really paid attention.

Reviews:

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a reunion with Cambridge Voices

Posted on September 21, 2012 by vhk10

On the Sunday of my Ely visit, Cambridge Voices (described in their publicity as ‘one of Europe’s finest choirs’!) came to rehearse Bach’s B minor Mass in the Lady Chapel under the direction of Ian de Massini. I dropped in, because I sang in the predecessor of this choir, the Cambridge Chamber Group, and knew many of its members. While the chapel was being set up I ‘worked the room’ and went round as many people whom I remembered as I could find in the time! And it was good to find that they remembered me too – in fact more than one suggested that I should insinuate myself into the choir for the concert, though my travel plans didn’t allow for that.

I notice that an altar with an elaborate iron fence round three sides (I forget the correct term for this) has appeared at the east end, which tones down the effect of the statue in the Chapel. I still suspect that the statue will be taken down for repairs before too long, and that these repairs will go on indefinitely.

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going up the Octagon

Posted on September 21, 2012 by vhk10

I have never been able to go up the Octagon in Ely Cathedral before, but it is now open to the public on guided tours, and some of us in the Cathedral Chamber Choir seized the chance to do so on our recent choir tour. If you have a head for heights you get wonderful views back down into the building and the painted angels are surprisingly broad-brushed when seen at close hand.

But we were there to sing, and I joined the choir part way through its Cathedral week. On Friday we sang an unaccompanied service (Gibbons and Byrd) in the Lady Chapel to a congregation ranged round the walls. I’d forgotten just how resonant a building this is.

Saturday was a bit of a wallow with Blair in B minor and Brahms’ How lovely are Thy dwellings.

On Sunday we gave the premiere of a Missa Brevis by our conductor, Matthew O’Donovan. Actually it’s not clear that it was the premiere because it was also being performed at a service that morning in Germany, conducted by another member of the choir. But our performance was complete (the Cathedral varied its usual liturgical pattern to allow us to sing both Kyrie and Gloria). It’s an intriguing mix of French-style choral and organ writing with some vigorous Latin American-influenced rhythms.

Our final evensong was a big sing – Dyson in D and Give unto the Lord by Elgar.

We stayed in Bishop Woodforde House, which was comfortable and gave us a generous breakfast each morning. And I think this is the first Cathedral week I’ve been on where the choir got two drinks parties!

There are some audio clips (including parts of the Friday Evensong and Sunday Eucharist) on the choir’s web site (go to the ‘visits’ tab and look for Ely).

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a Cathedral organist in a village church

Posted on September 11, 2012 by vhk10

The small village of Rumengol in Finistère has no amenities other than a bar and a church. However it’s no ordinary church, as twice a year it holds a pardon (religious festival with processions). The Assumptiontide pardon co-incided with our stay in the area and part of the festivities was an organ recital by Yves Cuenot, organist of Dijon Cathedral, which I went to.

The recital was a mixture of short pieces, transcriptions for organ, a couple of pieces where the organist accompanied a local singer, and, this being France, some improvisation, all on a Marian theme (rather loosely as it included the hymn to the Evening Star from Tannhäuser). The final piece on the programme was a ‘Suite pour Rumengol’ by M. Cuenot himself. The audience were invited to join in appropriate plainchant during the improvisations on the Magnificat (which I did) and to sing a locally well-known hymn in Breton at the end (which I didn’t).

I’d guess that Dijon is a mid-ranking Cathedral in the French organ world. So how did its organist come to be playing a rather rheumatic organ in a village church? I had the impression he was a regular visitor, so perhaps he usually spends his summers in the area. Or was it the prestige of the pardon?

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Prom 39: the off-stage brass that wasn’t

Posted on September 3, 2012 by vhk10

It’s been a dozen years since Berlioz’ Grande Messe des Morts was heard at the Proms, and the Albert Hall would seem a natural place for it, because of the huge forces, including four extra sets of brass instruments. When I performed this work in Colston Hall two years ago, these were distributed in four corners of the hall and the Proms prospectus implied that something similar would be done when Thierry Fischer brought the BBC National Orchestra of Wales to the Proms: ‘Although the work’s choral and instrumental requirements are massive, perhaps most revolutionary is its exploitation of the performance space as an element of composition.’

I accordingly positioned myself in the centre of the arena to enjoy the full aural effect of being surrounded by the brass players. However, they were ranged around the edge of the orchestra, apparently following Berlioz’ directions expressed in his memoirs. In fact, Berlioz said that the four bands should be at the corners of the combined choir and orchestra, which when the choir is 500 strong is quite different from simply putting them in a line behind the woodwind.

In any case, was Berlioz being pragmatic, thinking that the players available to him couldn’t cope with being in four corners of a large building? If he could have heard a good orchestra performing thus distributed, would he have given different instructions? I did feel that some of the immediacy – the sense that the events depicted are happening here, now – was lost from the passages where the extra brass were used.

The huge choral forces sang well, although the tenor soloist was recovering from illness and struggled with the higher passages in his very exposed part. Among the orchestra, I’ll single out the lead flute, whose notes seemed to dangle from a thread in some of the quieter, more intimate passages (tempi generally were on the slow side). I think she (or he) deserved their own call at the end.

I raved about this piece last time, but I’ll end with a some food for thought: what was it with Berlioz and judgement? Right from the start (his lost opera Les francs-juges dealt with a group of judges), and later especially the Last Judgement (in which Berlioz didn’t actually believe). He put the Dies irae plainchant into a symphony and emphased the Last Judgement in his Te Deum. His take on the Faust legend isn’t simply called Faust, but La damnation de Faust, emphasising the final verdict. No wonder he came up with something so extraordinary when he set the Dies Irae directly.

Reviews:

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Prom 12: Interval O’Boulez

Posted on September 1, 2012 by vhk10

My husband took the elder children to hear Daniel Barenboim conduct the West-Eastern Divan orchestra in a programme of Boulez (Mémoriale and Messagesquisse) and Beethoven (Fifth and Sixth Symphonies). They got a slip in their programme saying that the interval would be after the second Boulez piece, not the first, but many people were unaware of this change and after the first Boulez made a dash for the bar/toilets/ice-cream stall/natter in the corridor with friends, and then missed the second. (It says something about the Proms audience that most of those so excluded tried to get back in to hear the Boulez).

I’m told that the orchestra sounded good, though some sections of it are more accomplished than others.

Some reviews:

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the Cathedral with the beer mug

Posted on August 29, 2012 by vhk10

Lichfield Cathedral has a beer mug on display, which used to be used to issue a measure of beer to lay-clerks as part of their payment. That doesn’t happen any more (or rather it still does, but indirectly via the lay-clerks’ bank accounts).

I joined Priory Voices for a weekend of services there at the end of July. The Sunday morning music was Widor’s Mass, which I’d only ever rehearsed before, not performed. It’s edited from a Mass he wrote for two choirs (not double choir) – you can still see the joins in places.

The canticles included Murrill in E (for the second time in a week!) and Noble in B minor and we used Sumsion’s responses. Early music included O Sacrum Convivium by Croce, Tallis’ O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit, and Let thy merciful ears, O Lord. So nothing that required too much straining against Lichfield’s high pitch, except possibly Joubert’s O Lorde the maker of al thing.

Because of illness we had two conductors during the weekend and repeated Saturday’s anthem on Sunday.

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