the Festival opening night

Posted on June 3, 2009 by vhk10

Various family members were involved in this and I found myself dashing all over town to keep up.

It began by watching, and then following, my son in the procession of children carrying their artwork on a ‘sea’ theme down from the Assembly Rooms to the Abbey (negotiating a bottleneck where an electricity company had opportunely almost severed the route by digging right across it).

Then into the Abbey where other performers were waiting, including my daughter in her school’s ensemble, ready to perform Underneath by Stephen Hiscock. My daughter’s section was called ‘The Prawn’. She’d had a busy week, as the previous night she was in Bath’s Forum singing in the Bath Primary Schools Arts Festival (I couldn’t be there, so I can’t give a write-up of that).

Dashed home to change into concert gear, and back for a quick warm-up before the Chandos Singers did a slot in the Friends’ Meeting House. This was a showcase for a sample of the choir’s repertoire: Latin American baroque, an excerpt from the mediæval Mass in our last concert, and some Scandinavian/Baltic pieces which were new to me (such as Jaakko Mäntyjärvi’s setting of Double, double, toil and trouble, which turns up again later in the Festival, and In Deo salutare meum by Erki Meister).

Then we trooped across town to have a rehearsal as usual, and afterwards I returned to the Pump Room to hear the Paragon Singers in the final slot. This wound the evening down nicely. I hadn’t heard the choir for a few years and noticed some changes in the front row (my own place in the waiting list for auditions must have lapsed a while back). I’m afraid I can’t now remember all their programme (it had been a long evening), but it included Draw on, sweet night in competition with the closing firework display going on outside (at least I was sat in a position where I could see as well as hear the latter) They ended with two pieces by Britten: a setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins from around the time of A boy was born, new to me, and Oliver Cromwell, which I used to sing as a party piece with the John Powell Singers.

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MusicFest, Oxford and WNO

Posted on May 29, 2009 by vhk10

The Bath International Music Festival has started – not that it’s easy to tell if you walk around Bath. Apart from four banners decorated by children hanging on the south side of the Abbey, I’ve seen no street decorations at all, not even the little pennants that appeared in the Guildhall area last year. It’s not entirely to do with reduced budgets – the reason there is no banner across Milsom St. as there used to be is that Council rules only permit banners to stay there for one week. There is however a display in the window of Bath Compact Discs.

I’m a little worried that the focus of the Festival is beginning to move away from classical music; the Festival’s Facebook group gives this impression, though perhaps it has been skewed to try to reach younger audiences via Facebook. I will write accounts of the opening night, and of some other concerts, over the next few days.

On Wednesday I was in Oxford and went to evensong at Christ Church Cathedral – Weelkes, Gibbons and the full psalms for the day nicely sung by the Cathedral Singers (the Cathedral Choir was away for half-term). It took me back to my days in the Christ Church Cathedral Voluntary Choir, when it was the first Cathedral I ever sang services in – not entirely happy memories, as I found the conductor absolutely terrifying!

Meanwhile I was contacted by Welsh National Opera and invited to take part in a feedback discussion, as a representative audience member. I was rather sorry that I wasn’t free to do this, as I’m always willing to advance my opinions (as this blog shows).

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my Assembly Rooms fantasy

Posted on May 26, 2009 by vhk10

I can’t go to a concert in Bath’s Assembly Rooms without imagining what it would be like to swing on one of the large chandeliers that hang in the middle of the room. How heavy would you have to be before it came down? Where are the best hand-holds? Would the bits of crystal make a nice tinkly noise? What would you see as you spun round?

It’s just the Assembly Rooms that make me think this way, not the Guildhall which is similarly equipped with chandeliers.

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Kathleen Ferrier 1912-1953: A Memoir

Posted on May 17, 2009 by vhk10

ed. Neville Cardus.

I think this book must have sold in large numbers (the proceeds from sales went towards the Kathleen Ferrier memorial scholarships), because it is often to be found in second-hand shops. My copy was the 9th impression (published in July 1955), the first having appeared in September 1954.

It consists of memoirs of this great singer by Neville Cardus, Roy Henderson and Gerald Moore, with rather shorter contributions from Benjamin Britten, John Barbirolli and Bruno Walter, followed by an account of how she was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal at the end of her life, and a discography. The tone is very much one of personal reminiscence throughout, rather than systematic biography.

Kathleen Ferrier showed the same face to everyone – a good quality in itself, but one which makes the various accounts of her character somewhat repetitious. The most interesting contribution is that by Britten, because it sheds light also on his own working practices. If you have a bootleg recording of Kathleen Ferrier singing music by Britten, or the Angel in Gerontius, then various record companies would be interested in hearing from you.

This review originally appeared in Facebook’s Visual Bookshelf application. I’ve assembled some of my online reviews in a new blog, which I’ll update from time to time.

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Kodály and Fauré at St Stephen’s Lansdown

Posted on May 12, 2009 by vhk10

This church is a local landmark, but I haven’t sung in it for a long time (previous visits were to sing Holy Week devotional works with aggregations of local church choirs). I returned to augment A Handful of Singers (conducted by Christopher Finch) for a concert of two Mass settings.

I’ve sung Kodály’s Missa Brevis a number of times, though not within the last three years or so. It was included in the last concert I sang with the Chantry Singers; this was five years ago, although a surprising number of people think that I have sung with the choir since then, or even that I still do! Fortunately the piece had been very thoroughly drilled into me so I was able to recall it easily on one rehearsal. I notice one thing about the score which is unusual for a 20th century work: it has a dedication in Latin (presumably because this would be more widely understood than Hungarian).

The second half consisted of Fauré’s Requiem. I’ve sung this quite a few times in church recently, but with at most an obbligato violin in the Sanctus. This time there was a small band.

This concert was going to be followed by a chance to audition for the choir, but the vacancy has been filled by a former member who returned, so I’ll have to wait for another opportunity.

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the view from choir 8

Posted on April 28, 2009 by vhk10

I’ve written before about singing in Spem in Alium, I admit partly to see if it resulted in an invitation to sing the work in Tallis’ anniversary year of 2005. But I had to wait until now, with a performance by Chorus Angelorum conducted by Gavin Carr in front of a capacity and appreciative audience in Bath Abbey. One previous performance was at a wedding, and as I left for the concert I was telephoned out of the blue by the mother of the bride on that occasion, which I took to be a good omen!

I hadn’t sung in choir 8 before, but it is quite a good vantage point to be in, with plenty of time to prepare for your first entry. It also didn’t matter so much that my score just had choirs 7 and 8 in (with the other parts in an annotated reduction), since I was only adjacent to choir 7. On the other hand, the limited amount of space in Bath Abbey put me very near the front row of the audience! The choirs had to stand very close together, and rather than colour-code all eight of them, they alternated between singers in black and in white tops.

The other vocal pieces were four pieces of sacred music by Byrd (including I will not leave you comfortless, which I didn’t know before), and five songs by Dowland. The challenge for these last was making them sound as if sung by a small group, and getting to grips with the intricate words.

The concert also included the Bath Phil (like the Music Festival, they’ve got a shortened name now), conducted by Jason Thornton, performing Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro and Britten’s Lachrymae. The Britten used the theme from one of the Dowland songs we sang, and if you knew the song you could recognise fragments of the melody throughout. The grand finale was Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. The choir sang the theme beforehand with hymnal words, then quietly slipped round behind the orchestra (standing in the quire of the Abbey) and sang it again wordlessly in one of its early appearances in the piece.

There was a review in the Bath Chronicle.

I was in another concert two days later, and will write about it soon.

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10 < x < 40

Posted on April 21, 2009 by vhk10

I spent a chunk of the weekend rehearsing Tallis’ Spem in Alium, and as I did so, I realised how very many more parts it has than any other piece of English Tudor church music (I am aware of its relationship to Striggio’s Ecce beatem lucem and other highly polychoral continental pieces). I know of some pieces in ten parts by Weelkes, and Byrd’s Great Service is also in ten parts; is there anything else in this repertoire* in more than ten?

The high point for me is still the opening few bars (as I’m in choir 8 in this performance, I can appreciate them without worrying about my own entry). Would they be as beautiful if they led to a piece in a mere eight or ten parts, or is the effect partly due to anticipating all the other voices that are gradually going to enter?

*I shouldn’t really contrast ‘English’ and ‘Continental’ in the paragraph above, as I have now remembered that O bone Jesu by the Scottish Robert Carver is in 19 parts. I once performed this in a concert with Spem, in a punishingly high key.

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Holy Week and Easter 2009

Posted on April 16, 2009 by vhk10

This year has been very unusual in that I won’t be performing at all in the period from Palm Sunday to Low Sunday. I was invited to sing in two performances of Mozart’s Requiem: but I couldn’t make rehearsals for one, and the other was in Oxford which I’d just visited. There wasn’t an expanded Bath Camerata for their concert on Good Friday, as in some previous years (actually this has only happened once in the last few years, for the 20th anniversary of the choir in 2006, so the tradition is lapsing).

Normally I’d be singing at a Cathedral or similar for the Low Sunday weekend. This year I had invitations to Winchester Cathedral, Salisbury Cathedral and Tewkesbury Abbey for this weekend, but declined them all in favour of rehearsals for the next Chorus Angelorum concert: Spem in Alium and other Tudor pieces in Bath Abbey on April 23rd.

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an exhibition at the Bodleian

Posted on April 4, 2009 by vhk10

I went today to an interesting little exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. On display are scores of choral music from mediæval times to the present day, from the Bod’s own collections or on loan. They include the Eton Choirbook, autograph scores of the War Requiem, A Child of our Time and works by Blow and Purcell, and a surviving ms. copy of Spem in Alium. A Tudor organ book containing reductions of anthems which are otherwise lost must have provided hours of work for musicologists in reconstructing these pieces. There are also many other mss., printed scores of interest and a few recordings to listen to.

http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/news/2008_dec_01

I learnt more than I expected from going round this exhibition, as well as being reminded of pieces I’d performed or heard (the pages at which volumes are open have been carefully chosen). You are frequently reminded by conductors that early part-books did not have bar-lines, but only when I was confronted with one did the implications of this sink in. How did they manage to rehearse – did they have to sing the entire piece straight through over and over until they got it right, or was there some way to just go over one tricky passage in the middle? I did not know that choral societies used male altos, with women on the top line only, until well into the 19th century. There were several printed scores using sol-fa according to various systems. The sol-fa in printed scores of Britten was the tail end of this way of presenting music, and shows why it was inadequate. And, astonishingly, none of Oxford’s three choral foundations made a recording before the 1960’s. Was this thought a rather vulgar thing to do?

The exhibition runs till 25 April 2009.

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the Festival becomes a Fest

Posted on March 29, 2009 by vhk10

I’ve been booking tickets for the Bath International Music Festival. I think that’s what it’s still called in full, but the brochure for it now has ‘Bath International MusicFest’ on the cover, followed by a funny little splodge of a logo. So some rebranding has been going on, perhaps to match the Bath Literature Festival which is now the ‘LitFest’. Somehow I can’t see the term MusicFest catching on, but let’s wait and see.

Last year the Festival had quite a lively Facebook group associated with it, and I hope that this year they’ll enter individual concerts as events so that you can (if you like) let it be known which ones you’re going to.

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the work I’ve waited ten years to hear

Posted on March 28, 2009 by vhk10

A few years ago I took a ‘Which major work of Alban Berg are you?’ test*, and came out as the Chamber Concerto. I’m not sure this was very flattering, as the Chamber Concerto has the reputation of being the driest and most impenetrable of Berg’s major works, and is the least often performed and broadcast. I realised about ten years ago that it was the only work by Berg that I didn’t know at all, and resolved not to listen to it until I could get to a live performance. I finally managed to hear one at the RFH last Sunday night, performed by Mitsuko Uchida, Christian Tetzlaff and wind players from the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.

I hadn’t really known even what was meant by ‘Chamber Concerto’. It turned out to be an instance of a form that has never quite gone away, the double concerto, in this case for piano and violin. The accompanying orchestra consists of thirteen wind soloists – no opportunity for lush Viennese strings here. (The first flute becomes the leader of the orchestra, at least for the purposes of hand-shaking.) This performance belied the piece’s reputation because it was full of passion and drama, though it was still not easy to grasp on a first hearing. The sound-world seemed to me to have more in common with the works which follow it than those which precede, and in particular it was hard not to hear anticipations of the violin concerto in the central movement.

The concert opened with Mitsuko Uchida playing Berg’s Op. 1 piano sonata. I have a recording of her playing this, but this live performance was rather less restrained, though with a great transparency in the more thinly-textured passages.

These days programme notes about Berg’s music have a lot to say about the numeric and other codes in it (plenty of these in the Chamber Concerto!), perhaps to appeal to readers of the Da Vinci Code generation. This is the aspect of his music that interests me least, because usually it is undetectable in performance. In this particular piece the melody which encodes Schoenberg’s name anticipates Shostakovich’s use of the same device.

The second part was Mahler’s Ninth. Recordings can’t do justice to the huge climaxes and contrasts in the first movement in particular. After the first half, I suddenly had to adjust to listening to a far larger ensemble, and the effect of hearing the symphony after two works by Berg was to emphasise the differences between the two composers. Normally in performances of Mahler 9 I hear the similarities. Perhaps this particular interpretation was just a little too cautious, and there seemed to me to be some minor tuning problems towards the end of the second movement.

There are online reviews of the concert from the Guardian, Times, Sunday Times and Financial Times, which bear out my impressions, and it’s still available on Radio 3’s Listen Again till March 31st. Mitsuko Uchida is playing Berg’s Sonata again at St. George’s, Bristol on Friday April 3rd. And the Chamber Concerto is being conducted by Daniel Barenboim in the 2009 Proms season, on August 21st. It is also featured in ‘Discovering Music’ on Radio 3 on May 3rd.

*I don’t particularly recommend this test; it’s not nearly as good as, for example, Which Dead Russian Composer Are You? Maybe I just don’t get the references to American popular culture in the questions.

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another anniversary

Posted on March 27, 2009 by vhk10

Bet you didn’t know it was the tercentenary of Pergolesi’s birth this year! His dates are usually given as 1710-36, but the first of this is the registration of his birth in early January, rather than the birth itself, so it’s likely he was born in 1709.

The Chandos Singers celebrated by performing his Vespers, incorporating a couple of motets, Beatus Vir and Lauda Jerusalem by Vivaldi. There was a definite distinction in style between the two, though I’d find it hard to define. The Pergolesi seemed to anticipate that galant style, with a lot of simple, short phrases; I found the double-choir (or choir+group of soloists) sections the most interesting.

This made for a long first half – about 1½ hours – and in the second part we turned to another anniversary, that of the Avignon papacy, inaugurated in a Mass in March 1309 whose music we reconstructed. It is rather easy to dismiss music of this era as trivial to perform because for example it does not have a huge range. But it can make unusual demands in areas such as rhythm, no less so than a lot of 20th/21st century repertoire.

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