A few weeks ago I was listening to Bach’s B minor mass on the radio and regretting as I always do that I’d never sung soprano in a performance. (I did sing in a performance as a student, with the Schola Cantorum of Oxford. But they used me as an alto, and because several of the altos were really sopranos, some male choral scholars had to be drafted in at the last minute to boost the low end. It didn’t work very well! Since then I’d narrowly missed a number of performances by joining or leaving a choir at the wrong time).
The following day a flyer was put into my hand inviting me to join the Frome Festival Chorus for a performance in Wells Cathedral, preceded by intensive rehearsal. I jumped at the chance, and now this particular gap in my performing history has been filled.
Now you may say that a chorus of going on for 200 people is not the way to perform this work, and of course this is right, as it is far in excess of the forces Bach wrote for. But Bach’s music gets played in all sorts of instrumentations he never dreamed of (many were played in the BBC’s Bach Christmas in 2005) and somehow the greatness seems to survive. And I was too ashamed of the fact I’d never sung the Mass as a soprano!
When we got rehearsing I found the notes slipped into place fairly easily, probably because I have heard the Mass so many times. This may explain why when I did sing wrong notes they were usually other notes in the harmony!
I’ll end with some observations on recordings. The first one I really listened to was lent to me when it was a real novelty: Joshua Rifkin’s one-voice-to-a-part version. I can only admire the stamina of his singers, though I wonder if they ever performed it this way all in one go rather than recording it in several takes. Later I heard the John Eliot Gardiner recording, which divides listeners sharply. I admit that I was deeply disappointed by it – I expected so much more from the performers but it seemed to lack drive and a sense of direction. In the end I had to insist that we give it away and replace it with one that I could bear to listen to. We now have the Herreweghe version which I find sometimes on the fast side so that details whizz by before you can take them in, but am generally happy with.