The Bath Recital Artists’ Trust

Posted on October 13, 2011 by vhk10

This organises a regular and well-advertised series of recitals in the Pump Room, given by up-and-coming performers. My husband received a pair of complimentary tickets to the piano recital by Christopher Guild – we’re not sure why. Perhaps they selected some Bath University academics or members of the mailing list at the Festivals Box Office?

Anyway he went along and enjoyed the recital, though a bit tired to take it in after doing a 20-mile sponsored walk earlier in the day. The programme was a rather mixed bag comprising the Moonlight Sonata, Debussy’s Children’s Corner, Liszt’s paraphrase on a waltz from Faust, and Reubke’s sonata in B flat minor. Reubke is one of those cult composers among organists – his organ sonata based on Ps. 94 is mentioned by them in awe-struck tones – but this sonata was rather rambling. The Debussy came off best, in my husband’s opinion.

Another unusual feature of the concert was the birthday cake for all in the interval, as the event was also in honour of a major birthday for the organiser of the series.

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for whom the bell tolls

Posted on October 6, 2011 by vhk10

On September 10th I took part in a ‘come and sing’ Verdi Requiem at Bristol Cathedral with the New Bristol Sinfonia and soloists, presented as a 9/11 memorial concert. I passed up a chance to sing this work earlier in the year and realised it was a very long time since I’d sung it. As I transferred a couple of recordings to CD over the summer, I regretted this and so seized the opportunity to bridge this gap.

The ‘come and sing’ approach might not be thought to work too well for this particular piece, but I think some of the Bristol choral societies must have done it recently. While some of my neighbours were new to the work and others (like me) had not performed it for a while, the level of familiarity with it seemed to be very high. I think it’s also true that once you know the Verdi Requiem, it’s with you for life.

I go back quite a way with the conductor, Mark Lee, as he was organ scholar of my Cambridge college. He led a briskly efficient rehearsal in the afternoon (there had been an optional one earlier in the week).  Although I thought of our conductor as not one for taking risks, there was no prohibition on the alternative chorus soprano line near the end of the work, so several of us sopranos made a top C pact and did it.  I hadn’t sung it before, though I can’t now remember whether it was because I didn’t have the confidence or because the conductor explicitly told us not to.

We had a sizeable audience (unlike the performance I declined to join earlier in the year).  The concert had started at 7.30 and had a short pause in the middle though no interval.  The audience was expected to wait a moment at the end before applauding, but what actually happened was I think unscripted. As the final chord died away, the Cathedral clock struck the hour and then chimed nine.  It would detract from the efforts of the performers to say this was the defining moment of the evening, but there couldn’t have been a more appropriate ending.

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Weber/Berlioz at the Proms

Posted on September 26, 2011 by vhk10

My husband went to the penultimate night of the Proms. It’s no longer invariably Beethoven 9; this time it was a semi-staged performance of Der Freischütz in the adaptation by Berlioz, which sets recitatives to music and uses Invitation to the Dance as a ballet. Plus we think some re-orchestration of other bits.  It was performed by Monteverdi Choir forces, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and John Eliot Gardiner.

This was as close to being staged as you could get in a concert performance, with only sets missing.  In fact, strictly concert performances of operas, with singers ranged across the front of the stage in a line and not interacting with one another, are rather rare now.  The most effective use of the Royal Albert Hall’s space was in the Wolf’s Glen scene, when chorus members were distributed round the hall.  The principals were all satisfactory, though there was some slightly wooden acting; for some reason it is usually tenors who have this problem.  Sophie Karthäuser (Agathe) was definitely on the exhibitionist side. The French text and the setting of usually-spoken dialogue to music gave this old friend new clothes, but ones which fitted.

Here’s a review from the Guardian.

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And which voice do you sing?

Posted on September 19, 2011 by vhk10

Earlier this year a member of a smallish choir I sing with invited me to join an occasional choir which he conducts. Having described the repertoire that they do and the way it was organised, he had my interest right up to the point where he asked me ‘Do you sing soprano or alto?’

Now this would have been excusable if I’d been invited on the strength of being introduced at a social gathering with the words ‘This is … and she sings with … ‘.  But if you are going to try to flatter singers into joining you, it is usually best to show some sign that you know what their voice is like!

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Two and half degrees of slope

Posted on September 10, 2011 by vhk10

If you place a coin on its side on the floor of the nave of St. David’s Cathedral, aligned east-west, it will quickly start to roll westwards because of the slope of the building. It’s really quite disconcerting to see choir members in the stalls opposite apparently leaning at an implausible angle, especially if you had a drink at lunchtime.

The Cathedral Chamber Choir was making its first visit to St. David’s Cathedral.  I joined part way through the week, which included a couple of performances outside St. David’s, as we didn’t have so many services in the Cathedral itself.

My first service was a relatively modern one, with Kelly in C canticles and Sheppard Ye choirs of new Jerusalem.  By contrast, Friday’s was more subdued, partnering Tomkins’ (local connexion) Fifth Service with Duruflé’s Ubi Caritas.

A work new to most of us was David Briggs’ Messe pour Notre Dame, which we sang both at the Sunday morning Eucharist and in concert in St. Mary’s Church, Cardigan.  When I learnt some songs by Liszt once, I had the impression that the interest was mainly in the ‘accompaniment’, while you, the singer, were really a courtesy detail.  This Mass rather gave me the same impression in places. In fact some parts of it are taken directly from organ improvisations by Pierre Cochereau, while elsewhere the influence of Langlais (whose Messe Solennelle we considered doing) was apparent.  To provide some gentler reflective music at Communion we sang Byrd’s Confirma hoc, Deus (also new to me) as our anthem.

Our final service paired Howells’ ‘St. Paul’s’ Service (always good to sing) with The Spirit of the Lord by Elgar.

I recommend the free tours of the Cathedral, and also a visit to the ruined Bishop’ s Palace next door. Nice to see an old Mertonian (one of the early ones in this case) making good, even if no one’s really sure where he got the money from.

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Proms 57 and 60: Mozart piano concertos and big symphonies

Posted on September 6, 2011 by vhk10

Some others in the family went to Prom 57 on Saturday, this time going on spec and standing in the gallery.  The Tonhalle Orchestra from Zurich under David Zinman began with the premiere of Cold Heat by Anders Hillborg, which didn’t really inspire much reaction for or against.  Then Maria João Pires was the soloist in Mozart’s B flat concerto K595 (my daughter heard her play another Mozart concerto not long ago).  Mozart doesn’t come round so much at the Proms these days, probably because the smaller forces now usually used to perform his music aren’t so well suited to the Albert Hall.  So this performance sounded good but rather distant.

After the interval came the Eroica.  My family weren’t so impressed with this performance, which seemed to them not to be very engaged with the music, despite some interesting ornamentation in the slow movement.  But reviewers were more impressed; here are those from the Guardian, Independent and Telegraph.

A few days later some of us were back to hear the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra and Jaap van Zweden with another Mozart piano concerto, this time K503 in C played by David Fray.  Much the same comment about distance as with the other concerto, though I also found the performance a little bland.

After the interval came Bruckner 8. This was the first time I’d ever heard a Bruckner symphony in concert.  When I was doing Music A-level I could give you a neat little description of each symphony, ready for trotting out on the exam paper, but I also found that I didn’t particularly get his music (apart from the motets, which I discovered later).  I thought I might understand better after hearing a symphony live, but it didn’t work; I enjoyed parts but found the piece had its longueurs.  Was this my fault, or that of Bruckner, or of the performance?  Probably mine, because I gather the tempi were in fact on the fast side!  I know there is more to Bruckner than what I experience, because I keep being told that a really great performance is like meeting God (though the people who say this usually turn out to be convinced atheists).  As the hall appeared pretty full I wondered guiltily whether I’d deprived a Bruckner-lover of the chance to hear this performance.  Anyway, I shan’t write him off yet; maybe I should try a different symphony next time.

I found out there were at least three people I knew who were at this concert and would have liked to have had a chat. In future I’ll try to publicise my concert attendance in advance on Facebook at least.

Here are reviews of Prom 60 from the Guardian, Independent and Telegraph.

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Prom 42: Swan Lake

Posted on August 23, 2011 by vhk10

Some others in the family went to hear Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre orchestra perform Swan Lake at the Proms – my elder son’s first Promenade concert.

This went down well.  We have a recording of the complete score, but it seems to me to have its longeurs which would in the theatre be covered by dancing.  On the other hand a suite of highlights can be abrupt and seem too much like ‘greatest hits’.  The Mariinsky’s performing version, used at this concert, came out somewhere between the two and avoided these traps.  (I was following the concert at home on the radio).

The performance had one or two slips but I was assured that these didn’t matter because of the verve and idiomatic approach of the Russian performers.  And the Eastern European brass sound (a feature of many of the LPs I’ve been putting on CD) is not extinct in St. Petersburg.

The Guardian‘s review can be found here.

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no complaining in our streets

Posted on August 22, 2011 by vhk10

I thought I knew my psalter pretty well, but Ps. 144 seems to have passed me by altogether as I had no memory of the words at all. The Erleigh Cantors sang it at Sunday evensong in Bristol Cathedral (it did at least make up for the miserly handful of verses we got on the Saturday).

This was a demanding weekend and I was fortunate in being very familiar with most of the trickier pieces. I had Finzi’s  Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice very thoroughly drilled into me as an Oxford student, and learnt Walton’s Chichester Service and Berkeley’s The Lord is my Shepherd later at Cambridge.  I have sung Vierne’s Messe Solennelle (surely the most mis-spelt setting in the repertoire) enough times from the cut-down edition to know what is in the unprinted bars, and even Howells’ Responses (generally agreed to be the hardest set in widespread use) don’t hold the terrors for me now that they once did, as I’ve now performed them with several different groups.

There were some new pieces though, in the shape of two short movements from Rex gloriae (O nata lux and Laetentur caeli) by Mathias, to go with the Mathias anthem I sang earlier this year in the same place with many of the same people.  We didn’t go back into Tudor times this weekend, but included some Blow (his canticles in G, and Salvator Mundi as an introit) and Greene (Lord let me know mine end)

Because the Cathedral was hosting graduation ceremonies, we sang our Communion service not from the usual nave stalls but from the middle of a large bank of westward-facing seating, which made us feel a bit as if we were standing in for a choral society!  This was my third visit to sing in Bristol Cathedral this year, and it always feels odd to sing so near where I work.  It was also rather sad to observe that the harbourside area is a victim of the downturn, with some eating places having shut and other newly-built premises standing empty.

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Liszt’s chaotic pendulum

Posted on July 21, 2011 by vhk10

The second half of the Chandos Singers’ concert opened with a Salve Regina by Liszt.  The rules governing the length of each beat, we were told, were very complex and the net effect on the beat was rather like that of physical laws on a chaotic pendulum – unpredictable to the casual viewer, so no choice but to watch!

Our first half was based around Victoria’s Mass Ave Regina caelorum (just 8 parts this time) and there were several other settings of the text on the programme.  One was by a mediæval composer I hadn’t encountered before, Leonel Power, in which I was part of a semi-chorus.  Other pieces included a substantial psalm setting by Schütz, Ich hebe meine Augen auf and Turn thee unto me by Boyce. We brought back a few items, including Elibama, that we’d performed on the opening night of the Bath Festival.

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LPs batch 28: Chopin and other duplicates

Posted on July 8, 2011 by vhk10

This batch contained four miscellaneous Chopin discs: Pollini playing Etudes and Preludes, and two of Nikita Magaloff playing the Polonaises. Quite a bit of duplication because we both had significant Chopin collections. Another duplicate was Zimerman’s Schumann/Grieg concertos with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic – a standard combination of works.

The rest of the batch was vocal, both solo (Fischer-Dieskau and Barenboim performing the Mörike-Lieder) and choral (Handel’s Dixit/Nisi Dominus with Winchester Cathedral Choir, and ‘Anthems from King’s,’ a very popular disc of favourite big sings from the Cathedral repertoire.)

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Bath MusicFest 2011

Posted on June 30, 2011 by vhk10

The Festival is shorter now and largely coincided with half-term, so there was less opportunity to go to concerts, but we managed two.

Some in the family went to hear the Scholtes and Janssens Piano Duo perform in the Assembly Rooms.  This was enjoyable, although my daughter preferred the pieces she had encountered only in this medium, such as Mozart’s sonata K381 and Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir to those which were also orchestrated, such as La Valse and Brahms’ Variations ‘on a theme of Haydn’. Perhaps she just missed the orchestra when she knew the orchestral version.

Later on I went to a concert at the Roman Baths, with the Arte Corale of Moscow performing Russian liturgical music.  This turned out to be a rather small ensemble, although their (female) conductor occasionally boosted the otherwise all-male group! All the pieces and many of the composers were unknown to me.  Some had written church music at times when it was difficult or risky to do so – but without being able to move it on stylistically.  The mid-20th century pieces seemed unadventurous compared with even the level of innovation in Anglican church music of the same period.  Was the difficulty created by the circumstances they were written in, is the Orthodox musical tradition very resistant to change, or were the composers writing church music just not very original?

The choir stood on one side of the baths and the audience stood or sat around the other sides.  The acoustic was not ‘bathroom-like’ but somewhere between an indoor and an outdoor sound.  Singing across water is not forgiving and I thought I detected a little raggedness and fluctuating intonation at times – it was the choir’s second concert of the evening.  I found my ear gravitating to a couple of quality voices in particular.

An obbligato was provided by a drake which flew in a couple of times, and swam round quacking and looking at the audience. It even took its own curtain call at the end.  I gather that it had courted a duck in the Baths and then lost its mate.  I don’t know what it should have been performing – the appropriate music from Peter and the Wolf or maybe a Quackoviak?

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Leicester falls

Posted on June 20, 2011 by vhk10

A week after Salisbury I was at Leicester Cathedral for a day with the Peterborough Chamber Choir. We sang the two services on Sunday, with the morning one featuring Mozart including his Missa Brevis K65, the earliest Mozart I’ve sung but not trivial for that.  The other new music to me was Gerald Brown’s Responses; I wonder whether they were written for a precentor who was lacking in confidence as the versicle parts are entirely on G.  The choir responses, by contrast, keep swapping between G major and C minor (and related keys), though not as hard as this might sound.

Leicester is a pleasant building to sing in, but I think it feels less Cathedral-like than any other British Cathedral I’ve been to.  It’s also in the middle of some re-ordering, with the Eucharist sung from makeshift choir-stalls at the back, though we were in the quire for evensong.  To make up for this, though, there was a newly refurbished and extended building nearby with the song room (and a kitchen for choir use) in – so new that it hadn’t yet been officially opened! And I recommend the home-made cake sold after the morning service.

Leicester was one of only three English Church of England Cathedrals I hadn’t performed in. Now only Bradford and Wakefield remain.

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