silent spring

Posted on January 14, 2008 by vhk10

I spent part of an evening last week emailing people to turn down requests to sing. I was a bit sorry to do this, although of course it is nice to get the requests in the first place. But the way my diary has worked out this spring means that I’ll just be doing special services at church before the Chandos Singers concert on March 15th, no services or concerts elsewhere. I’ll find some other things to write about – book reviews, perhaps – in the meantime. For now it’s good to see that this has been indexed by Google and viewing stats are accordingly on the up.

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this blog is lonely!

Posted on January 1, 2008 by vhk10

I moved this blog in the autumn but Google hasn’t yet caught up with it, although I’ve twice submitted the site for inclusion. So the visits have come from my regular readers or via links on my web page or Facebook profile, or from other search engines. But the stream of readers looking for chords for ‘the wheels on the bus’ and so on has dried up. I hope that I’ll get them back before too long as it feels a bit lonely without them. Meanwhile I’ll keep posting and try to average one a week.

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2007’s and 2008’s resolutions

Posted on December 31, 2007 by vhk10

Time for the annual review of the year and some resolutions for 2008. 2007 taught me that you simply cannot guess at New Year what the next twelve months might bring. I couldn’t have imagined that in June I’d be on the stage of the Teatro Regio in Turin singing Messiaen. This came via the performance of the St Matthew Passion in Bath Abbey in Holy Week and led to more interesting singing later in the year.

On the cathedral front, I managed to fit in quite a few engagements, including a first visit to Birmingham Cathedral, some high-standard services in Norwich in the summer and a trip to Wells in the autumn. I had some vocal problems as the year went on, but these seem now to have been sorted out.

How did my other resolutions shape up? Some things came round from the wishlist – music by Philip Moore and the above-mentioned St. Matthew Passion – and a few other new pieces such as Rossini’s Stabat Mater on Good Friday. I have taken part in more high-quality performances this year than I have done since… erm, not sure when.

I have maintained or regained contact with quite a number of singers, conductors and other musicians via Facebook. I estimate that at least half of my Facebook friends are known to me through a musical connexion. It’s led to several invitations to sing, although I haven’t taken any of them up. I’ve also started a Facebook group for those on the Lord Mayor’s chapel choir dep list. I wonder how many people are on it and whether any have been waiting as long for a chance to sing as I have?

Resolutions for 2008? Obviously there are the three outstanding cathedrals to be sung in: Wakefield, Bradford and Leicester. And more pieces from the wishlist. I have some other ideas but don’t want to publicise them. Let’s just say I hope 2008 will match up to the best of 2007.

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avoiding a run chase

Posted on December 30, 2007 by vhk10

My last performance before Christmas was the Messiah with Chorus Angelorum and members of the Bath Philharmonia in Ottery St Mary. I worked out that I must have sung at least nine performances of this now (here’s an account of the previous one), and probably most of them from the same vocal score, so I really should go round systematically rubbing out markings (apart from notes to myself about such matters as particular notes which are hard to tune and so on).

This particular performance had few cuts (of the choruses, only Let all the angels of God and But thanks be to God were lost).

Our conductor gave us useful advice about tackling the runs, which I will pass on. Try consciously slowing them down (obviously while keeping in time with the conductor). I was a bit sceptical about how one could do this, but it really worked for me.

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In Terra Pax

Posted on December 30, 2007 by vhk10

A quick round-up of some pieces in the Chandos Singers’ latest concert in mid-December.

We (in fact mostly the men) sang a mediæval Gloria. (I’ll fill in the composer’s name when I’m in the same place as the programme). I rarely perform music this early, and there were some rather startling sounds in it (including a leap of one voice of an augmented 4th to make an augmented triad!)

I hadn’t heard of Ingegneri (Monteverdi’s teacher); on the basis of the piece we sang, there is a lot to be rediscovered. And an evening hymn by Sheppard, who suddenly seems to be crossing my radar more frequently.

I hadn’t sung In Terra Pax by Finzi since I was a student, but it all came back easily. I still think the music which accompanies the arrival of the angels sounds like the cavalry charge in a Western!

The main work was Bach’s Magnificat, in a performance which reconstructed a 19th-century revival by Samuel Wesley. This meant inserting some of the interpolated movements from the E flat version, redistributing some solos between voices, and having a singer perform the Tonus Peregrinus counter-melody in Suscepit Israel (in which I was one of the trio).

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Venter puellae baiulat

Posted on December 11, 2007 by vhk10

I hadn’t come across this Latin verb before, but it turned up in the text of A solis ortus cardine. We sang a ‘standard’ selection of verses at various points during the Advent carol service. (I am relieved it wasn’t the entire hymn, as it runs to 23 verses, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet.)

Other pieces included Lloyd’s Advent Prose (rejected by one cathedral choir as too difficult for them!), Rejoice in the Lord Alway attributed to Redford, Virga Jesse by Bruckner and O magnum mysterium by Victoria.

The previous day I went over to St. George’s Bristol to hear a friend premiering a flute concerto by Maurice Wright, as part of a gala concert. (Now what makes a concert a gala concert? Is it that it is in honour of a particular person – Rostropovich in this case – or event? Or is it a way of bundling up various diverse pieces of music into a single progamme?) Anyway, I was glad to get an opportunity to get to know Bruch’s Kol Nidre better. But I’m not so keen on Beethoven’s 2nd piano concerto. There is one very striking moment – the dramatic shift of style and quality in the first movement cadenza, as the unremarkable music heard so far gives way to middle-period Beethoven, and you suddenly realise what the composer was going on to achieve. Similarly the tuneful finale was also written later than the rest (I heard the original finale on R3 a few days later and again there’s no mistaking the improvement).

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Leif Segerstam conducts

Posted on December 4, 2007 by vhk10

On the second Saturday morning of the Mozartfest I heard the Belcea Quartet perform Haydn (op. 77 no.1), Ravel’s quartet and Mozart’s clarinet quartet. The highlight of this was the wonderful stillness of some of the quiet passages in the Ravel. I enjoy these Saturday morning concerts though it was a long time since I’ve been to a concert where there were so many latecomers (perhaps the traffic was bad).

The final Mozartfest concert was the Philharmonia, conducted by Leif Segerstam, in the Forum. If you don’t know the collection of remarks made by Leif Segerstam in rehearsal, go away and read it, because it is much more entertaining than this blog. I’m not very fond of the Forum as a venue – I always feel I’m miles away from the performers – and when the London orchestras visit I can’t help wondering how many deps are in the ranks. But my daughter and I enjoyed the programme of the Egmont overture, Mozart’s piano concerto in B flat (although I felt the solo part was rather staccato) and Tchaikovsky 4.

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What’s a lady like me doing in a joint like this?

Posted on December 4, 2007 by vhk10

So asked Felicity Lott at the end of the recital in Bath’s Guildhall. I bet she saves that particular encore for all the plushest, most chandelier-laden venues. Many of the songs in her programme of Mozart, Strauss, Barber and Poulenc were ones I’ve learnt myself, so I was really able to appreciate the exemplary demonstration of how to do breath control.

Others in the family went to other concerts earlier in the festival. The Takacs Quartet were as good as usual, although they seemed to warm up a bit as the programme progressed. On Monday it was the Nash Ensemble. The novelty in the programme here was Mendelssohn’s String Quintet in E flat, Op.87. This was new both to us and to a professional musician we know who was at the concert. It didn’t seem to deserve its neglect, either. Richard Goode’s recital on the Wednesday was less satisfactory.

One difference this year is that the seating in the Assembly Rooms isn’t slightly raked as it has been in other recent festivals.  This makes it hard to see the performers if you’re near the back.  Another posting about the Mozartfest follows.

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The Sacrifice

Posted on November 22, 2007 by vhk10

Welsh National Opera used to tailor letters to members of their mailing list based on what they had booked for in the past. I can see them writing to me: ‘Dear Dr Knight, We see that you have a liking for harrowing operas ….’. After going to Wozzeck and Mazeppa it was time to see James MacMillan’s new opera at the Bristol Hippodrome. (I noticed some similarity of plot to Mazeppa; a woman married to her father’s political enemy, rejecting another man who remains around to cause trouble.)

It was well attended, including several members of the Exultate Singers, with whom I sang MacMillan’s Canticos Sagrados a while back; we compared notes afterwards over a drink.

This opera got mixed reviews, and overall I was in favour of it. I had my usual reaction to MacMillan’s music, which is that I can appreciate it but I’m not overwhelmed by it as a listener in the way I know some people are. I went to his other Mabinogion-inspired work, The Birds of Rhiannon, at the Proms a few years ago, but don’t remember enough about it to make a comparison. The vocal writing here was rather different to that in his sacred music, without the characteristic twiddles of the latter (though I’m not sure MacMillan himself recognises much of a division between sacred and secular). The scoring used brass heavily.

I found the plot coherent enough, although the attempt to work the Mabinogion legend into the final stages of it was rather contrived. I think we will get another production before long, and only then will it be really really to judge its worth. Not because the performances for WNO were inadequate (they weren’t), but because we need to see how well it works with different approaches and casts.

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a final trip to the Undercroft

Posted on November 9, 2007 by vhk10

The new choir room at Wells Cathedral wasn’t quite ready when the Erleigh Cantors visited to sing Evensong, so we used the Undercroft to rehearse. Actually I don’t think I’ve ever rehearsed there; the Bath Camerata Good Friday events haven’t used it, and the only time I sang a service here before, with Priory Voices, I was just there on the afternoon and we only rehearsed upstairs. I can see why they’re keen to have a better rehearsal space.

We sang Jackson’s Canticles in G, which were very thoroughly drilled into me at Cambridge. The anthem was Seek him that maketh the seven stars by Jonathan Dove, which I hadn’t sung before. I was swapped around between 1st/2nd soprano which kept me on my toes (another singer had fallen ill at a late stage so we were one down). The vocal lines were pretty straightforward in themselves (apart from one rhythmically complex passage), the interest coming when voices were combined with the organ part to create an effect that was more than the sum of voices and organ individually.

Our responses were the Spicer second set (anyone know the first set? To our knowledge they are unpublished). It was a pity that in a place as committed to psalmody as Wells we were only assigned half of the day’s psalms. Why is it that women are thought to be able to cope with the full day’s psalms as choirgirls (we had two former girl choristers) but when they grow up the opportunities to sing them vanish almost completely?

There’s a lot happening right now so expect postings about James MacMillan’s new opera and the Bath Mozartfest.

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a funeral, a concert and a service

Posted on November 3, 2007 by vhk10

The last couple of weeks have been busy. There was a funeral at which the music included Stanford’s Blue Bird, performed at the end as the coffin was carried out. I did the solo in this and hadn’t encountered it at a funeral before, or indeed at any time of year other than the summer. But it didn’t seem out of place.

I returned to hear the Boyan Ensemble of Kiev perform a mixture of sacred and secular music. I admired their stamina, not only in doing a tour with a performance almost every night, but also in performing a concert programme without instrumental music to give the singers a rest. It was interesting to hear, for example, counter-tenor singing Ukrainian style, but I think I preferred the sacred music in the first half of the concert. The folk-songs in the second part were a bit over-arranged for my taste – it almost had me wishing for some John Rutter. The church pieces were more sober, though less melancholy than such music often is because they were themed around the Easter season.

For All Souls’ day we performed the Requiem setting by Charpentier, new to me, but then as I’ve said before much of this composer is under-performed. This sets a rather unusual selection of texts from the Requiem Mass, with a De Profundis for good measure. As with other music I’ve done by this composer, the notes are not hard but the pitch is consistently high.

An account of the Erleigh Cantors’ visit to Wells will follow.

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Medici Arts TV

Posted on October 28, 2007 by vhk10

I have been looking at – and listening to – their website here:

http://www.medici-arts.tv/

At any given time there is one concert which you can both view and listen to. So far the calibre of performances (in the musical sense) is very high. I tried this out on various computers for performance (in the computing sense) and synchronicity between sound and vision – watching percussion is a particularly good test of this.

On a wireless laptop the streaming didn’t really work at all first time, but revisiting it now it has improved. However, there’s still a bit of time lag between sound and vision; unlike the real world, you hear the notes before you see them played. The same problem with synchronicity appeared when I looked at the site over a (wired) broadband link. On a LAN there was no problem.

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