A Royal Wedding anthem

Posted on January 30, 2011 by vhk10

Today I joined the choir of St. Peter’s Church, Caversham, for evensong at Bristol Cathedral. Our anthem was Let the people praise thee O God by Mathias, and this set some of us wondering who might be writing music for the forthcoming royal wedding. Like the designer of the dress, this information hasn’t been made public yet. I wonder if it will produce a piece that will still have a place in the repertory thirty years later, as Mathias’ has? It would be nice to think so.

Our introit was (not very surprisingly) When to the Temple Mary went by Eccard and the canticles Walmisley in D minor. The responses were Radcliffe’s, written in 1972. Were these the last to set ‘praised’ as two syllables?

A combination of a large choir and short stalls meant that unusually I was not in the front row, so a bit more work was needed to watch the conductor. And this was the first time since a a very hot 2003 that I have worn a surplice to sing a service, and I think possibly only the second time I have ever done so.

Posted in singing at services | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Genius of Mozart

Posted on January 14, 2011 by vhk10

I rather dipped into this 12-day trawl through all of Mozart on BBC Radio 3, rather than listening to chunks. There were some real high points; I enjoyed the broadcasts of Entführung (especially as I happened to be having a kebab night that evening) and New College’s account of the Requiem with male soloists.

But I still felt the comparable surveys of Beethoven and Bach worked better. As I remarked before, there’s an awful lot of juvenilia to be got through compared with those two, and Mozart’s style doesn’t evolve as much as Beethoven’s, so there’s a lack of variety after a while. Also if you tuned in at the wrong time you got single movements instead of complete works. And despite the Köchel numbers going up to 626, you didn’t have to listen much to start hearing the same pieces more than once; this happened to me with the C minor piano fantasia (one of my Grade 8 piano pieces), the D minor piano concerto and some of the songs. I think this was largely due to allowing listeners and performers to nominate or perform favourite pieces by Mozart, after his entire output had already been programmed at other times.

Posted in broadcasts | Tagged | Leave a comment

2010 in review – from WordPress

Posted on January 2, 2011 by vhk10

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,700 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 55 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 387 posts.

The busiest day of the year was January 28th with 53 views. The most popular post that day was booking St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, ilrt.bris.ac.uk, dominantpedal.blogspot.com, forex-expose.co.cc, and en.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for vhk singing, vhk, bell ringers hymn, bellringers hymn, and priory voices.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

booking St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey January 2010
5 comments

2

Bellringers’ hymns March 2009
4 comments

3

the missing chamber choirs of Manchester March 2004
14 comments

4

the words of the anthem are … March 2010

5

the singing revival December 2009
2 comments

Posted in category-defying | Leave a comment

The Armed Man for Remembrance

Posted on December 12, 2010 by vhk10

I joined the choir at my daughter’s school for a performance of selections from Karl Jenkins’ Armed Man mass. Not being a Classic FM devotee, I’d not heard the piece before and wasn’t sure how I’d get on with it. I’d be happy to sing it again – which ranks it above quite a few things I’ve sung – although I found the vocal writing pretty unsympathetic. I counted 24 top As in the (undivided) soprano line, and there are quite a few more in the entire work! Perhaps I’m a bit unfair, as I would have liked to sing the more melodic Kyrie and Agnus Dei, but the parents’ choir weren’t involved in these movements.

Like Britten’s War Requiem, this aspires to be a work for the world by including non-Western musical elements but is more thorough-going by widening the range of origins of the texts too. (When I sang it two years ago, I wasn’t really convinced by Britten’s use of gamelan style).

We didn’t find it very hard to learn, which I think was due to a large amount of repetition so the musical content went a long way. I gather this wasn’t the first such concert, so I hope I’ll get a chance to augment the school choir again.

Posted in singing in concerts | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Mozartfest 2010: Monteverdi’s aspect ratio

Posted on November 23, 2010 by vhk10

Others in the family made it to one of the central performances of the Mozartfest, Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort and Players’ interpretation of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. This was quite a marathon as it was given without an interval, and also included some other pieces such as organ works, in line with the conductor’s understanding of how it could have been performed liturgically. He has reordered Monteverdi’s movements so that the work ends with the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria, Duo Seraphim and Audi Cœlum.

While according to McCreesh this does away with the ‘Romantic sense of inevitable climax’ of the usual order of movements, it put a lot of slow-moving sections together, which (I’m told) made quite heavy demands on the listeners. There also seemed to be more moving around between movements than is usual even in performances of this work. But the audience members in the family were quite happy with the quality of the performances.

Recently Bath Abbey has installed CCTV screens around the building showing views of the performers, particularly valuable if you are in one of the many seats east of the choir stalls, or in a side aisle or transept, so you have little or no direct view of them. However, for this concert the aspect ratio of the images on the screens was slightly awry, and didn’t flatter the singers’ figures.

There is a review from the Guardian here.

Posted in going to concerts | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Mozartfest 2010: two chamber music concerts

Posted on November 21, 2010 by vhk10

There was the usual attractive programme for the 2010 Bath Mozartfest, and between us we went to three concerts. First up was the Belcea Quartet with Julian Rachlin on viola, for which we bought what must have been the last pair of tickets. Mozart’s string quintet in G minor K516 came off best, especially in the delicate quiet passages. After the interval was the Grosse Fuge which somehow didn’t quite gel. The final piece on the programme was Brahms’ String Quintet No 2 in G major Op. 111, a work which was quite unfamiliar to me. I was in general happy with the performance, though here and in the Mozart I sometimes felt the sound was bottom-heavy. (Maybe this was due to my position near the back of the Assembly Rooms).

Later in the Festival others in the family went to hear the Jerusalem Quartet play Mozart’s early C major quartet K157, Mendelssohn’s quartet in E minor Op. 44 no. 2 and Brahms’ Quartet Op. 51 no. 1. These performances were reported as satisfactory, though they would have benefited from more variety in tempo and dynamics.

Posted in going to concerts | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

LPs batch 25: concertos and chamber music

Posted on November 12, 2010 by vhk10

I’m moving on to some of the boxed sets I haven’t tackled earlier. Three of the discs in this batch were recordings that we very much want to have available: Beethoven middle-period string quartets played by the Alban Berg Quartet. I started another box of Beethoven: violin sonatas performed by Kovacs and Bächer (and long absent from the catalogue, though there is nothing wrong with the performances).

The rest of this batch was two discs of Mozart: violin concertos with Josef Suk and the Prague Chamber Orchestra and closer to home the two minor-key piano concertos with Alfred Brendel, Neville Marrriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Finally a pairing which appears several times in my LPs, the Philharmonia and Carlo Maria Giulini play Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony and Brahms’ variations on the St Anthony Chorale.

Posted in recordings | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

the Byrd 5-part Mass reappears

Posted on November 5, 2010 by vhk10

I joined Priory Voices for a weekend of services in Wells in autumn half-term. The highlight for me was a chance to sing movements from Byrd’s five-part Mass. This was especially welcome because I had had to decline an invitation to sing at Southwark the same weekend, which also included the Mass. The curious thing is that I haven’t sung this setting, or even been invited to as far as I can recall, since I was a student! Why is it suddenly so popular? Is there a sudden outbreak of tenors? A new edition? Or is it because it was performed for the Pope on his recent visit to Westminster Cathedral?

We paired the Byrd with his lengthy setting of the Eucharistic text O quam suavis, which was new to me. Another totally new piece (and composer) was Croce’s Descendi in hortum meum. I’d not have guessed Croce was Venetian from the style. The other early piece was a great favourite of mine which I haven’t sung for a while: Blow’s Salvator mundi, which I feel can hold its own against almost any of Purcell’s church music.

The responses we used were by Judith Ward, a member of the choir who was standing next to me in the stalls, something of a mixed blessing: I didn’t want to mess them up in her hearing (I don’t think I did) but on the other hand I knew she’d be singing them correctly! With many of the choir having Manchester connexions, it was interesting to have a gospel acclamation by Stuart Beer, even if we were never sure whether the top line was E flat or E natural (one advantage of having the composer with you).

Our evensong settings were both twentieth-century: Howells ‘Coll. Reg.’ (which I hadn’t done for a while) and Wood’s setting in F for double choir. We finished our weekend with Faire is the Heaven.

Posted in singing at services | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

a family concert with the Classic Buskers

Posted on October 25, 2010 by vhk10

When I lived in Cambridge I sang with the ‘Cambridge Chamber Group’, conducted by Ian Moore. Ian has for some time been one half of the Classic Buskers, travelling the world with an accordion as accompanist to Michael Copley’s variety of wind instruments. (He still conducts a choir, Cambridge Voices, but in that capacity is known as Ian de Massini.)

The Classic Buskers came to Bath as part of the Chantry Singers’ final Bach Festival. I didn’t make it to any of the choral concerts, though I had earlier investigated whether the choir needed expanding with sopranos as I thought it would be nice to sing with it one last time, but only other voices were needed.

There was some confusion over the pricing for this particular concert but when I noticed that a flyer offered half-price tickets for young people I got a reduction on the ticket for my son, one of quite a few children at the concert, which was in the Guildhall.

Many of the pieces by J. S. Bach and they ranged from fairly straightforward short transcriptions for flute and accordion to wackier arrangements which quoted freely from other composers (part of the fun is catching these allusions as they fly past). The instruments involved included flutes, recorders, pan-pipes, a rubber chicken and ocarinas of all sizes (up to dinner-plate).

I recognised a few tracks from a recording by the Buskers, Omnibusk, but it is more entertaining to see as well as hear them because there is quite a lot of stage business such as the clock which was produced during the ‘Minute’ Waltz. (I wasn’t very well placed to see all of this as the seating was in ‘wide’ formation and we were towards one side). Yes, the rate of notes per second could get very high!

We had an fun evening and I was glad that at last I’d caught up with the Buskers live after hearing about them second-hand from many quarters.

Posted in going to concerts | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

the Wesley anniversary observed

Posted on October 14, 2010 by vhk10

I thought that I might not end up singing any S.S. Wesley in this anniversary year, but I was invited to sing ‘Lead me Lord’ in a service at Charlecombe church (along with a new setting of Ecce Sacerdos). It would be nice one day to sing the whole anthem of which this is only the closing section, but its length only makes it suitable for cathedral services. It’s interesting to see that Wesley is holding a place on music lists to a greater extent than some of his contemporaries, and seems to have survived being tarred with the Victoriana brush. The Evening Canticles in E certainly have a place in the repertoire, though the Nunc is often beefed up by replacing the Gloria with one taken from the Jubilate in the same key. Many of his anthems are on too large a scale for most places, but there are several shorter ones in use, though Cast me not away from thy presence seems to have fallen from favour now.

When at Cambridge I sang on a cassette recording of Wesley’s music with the choir of Christ’s College. This was in fact the first recording of some parts of the complete E major service, such as the rather dull setting of parts of the Communion liturgy. We also recorded Ascribe Unto the Lord (in which I sang one of the verse parts) and Blessed be the God and Father.

Posted in singing at services | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

where to stay at St. David’s

Posted on September 28, 2010 by vhk10

The Cathedral Chamber Choir is going (by popular demand) to St. David’s next August for a week. We are already trying to book somewhere for those choir members who don’t want to make their own arrangements to stay. The Courthouse in St David’s only does Sat-Sat booking in August and in any case has already been booked for our week. It would be good to hear of alternatives in the area.

Posted in booking visiting choirs | Tagged | Leave a comment

Chopin concertos

Posted on September 27, 2010 by vhk10

Last Thursday I went to the last of the Bath Phil’s ‘Summer Classics’ season at Bath Abbey. The programme had been changed (as with the last Bath Phil concert I went to) with Lutoslawski and Gorecki disappearing in favour of the rather less Polish Hebrides overture, played with considerable verve.

The main part of the concert was Chopin’s two piano concertos, played by Peter Donohoe. Some years ago a choir director claimed that Mr Donohoe borrowed and still had his best pair of cufflinks, but I was sat too far back to be able to tell whether he was wearing any. The performances were energetic and fluent, though at the back of the nave the detail of the orchestra came over rather better than that in the piano part. There is a problem with this programme for the orchestra, which is that they were playing almost nothing except Chopin, whose orchestral writing can’t be said to be very interesting. The conductor (Jason Thornton) did something with it by introducing a bit more rubato into the orchestral part than you usually get, also tweaking some dynamic markings such as the end of the first movement of the E minor concerto.

Hearing both concertos together confirmed my opinion (pretty generally shared) that the so-called first (in E minor) is considerably the better of the two. Though there are some good moments in the F minor concerto, particularly in the slow movement.

As an extra we were given the Andante spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante, in the original version with orchestra. Peter Donohoe remained sprightly to the end.

There is a review from the Bath Chronicle here.

Posted in going to concerts | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment