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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Posted in funeral, going to concerts, singing at services | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

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.

Posted in broadcasts, on the Web | Leave a comment

do I want to post a slug?

Posted on October 19, 2007 by vhk10

I am offered the chance to do this in the margin as I compose this. Much as I dislike slugs (and we certainly have too many of them) I don’t think I’d want to do this to anyone! I suppose I’d better have a look at the WordPress documentation.

Posted in category-defying | 2 Comments

pushing the envelope

Posted on October 19, 2007 by vhk10

Or thinking out of the box, or some other piece of management-speak. What I mean is doing something I don’t usually do – in this case singing some Gilbert and Sullivan. I only do this rarely, but when I do I always find I enjoy it more than I thought I would.

In this case it was a come-and-sing Mikado. The chorus was carefully seeded with members of the local G & S society so I was able to mug along with them on the less obvious bits. Doing a whole opera, rather than just an excerpt, allows you to identify the various targets of the satire as they appear – everything from general officiousness to penny dreadfuls. And it was the first come-and-sing performance I’ve been involved in where there were more in the audience than performing!

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

a double booking?

Posted on October 19, 2007 by vhk10

We had a brief panic this week concerning a forthcoming Cathedral Chamber Choir booking. A member of the choir heard that another choir she sang in was going to the same place at the same time! I have checked with the cathedral concerned and we are definitely booked in there and not the other lot.

It was as well to check, because double bookings of visiting choirs are surprisingly common. I think cathedrals are now more organised than they used to be about the admin related to this, but it still can be seen as a chore which is passed to someone relatively junior, such as a gap-year organ scholar. By the time the actual event approaches a couple of years later, that organ scholar has long since moved on – and a different organ scholar who hasn’t dealt with either choir before has to sort out the mess.
(I should stress that the cathedral I referred to above doesn’t deal with visiting choirs this way!)

Posted in booking visiting choirs | Leave a comment

two anniversary concerts

Posted on October 13, 2007 by vhk10

Nigel Perrin’s 60th birthday concert is happening next month, but former members of the Bath Camerata aren’t automatically included. I suppose that we got our celebratory concert at the choir’s 20th birthday bash last year and that if everyone who’d ever sung for Nigel was performing, there’d be no room for an audience! I can always go and listen if I feel like it.

Tonight there was a concert to mark the fifth anniversary of the Exultate Singers. I had expressed an intention to go, but in the end I was too busy to make it (no, it wasn’t because of the rugby semi-final). I was sorry to miss it, though I think if I’d been there I might have felt sad that I wasn’t singing

Posted in going to concerts | Tagged , | 2 Comments

a launch at Merton

Posted on October 1, 2007 by vhk10

I went to the fund-raising concert which launched the new choral foundation at Merton College Oxford. Having said ever since I left the College that Oxford colleges lagged way behind Cambridge in this area, I thought I should put my money where my mouth was. I have written before about the the choral foundation and my time at Merton.

The Tallis Scholars were as good as you’d expect, and performed a mixture of their current recording projects, as well as some more familiar pieces from their repertoire. In particular, they did Allegri’s Miserere which they have recorded a couple of times in the chapel. I was particularly impressed with the flawless ensemble in the final verse, with the two choirs at opposite ends of the chapel; this is considerably harder than getting the top C!

The Warden made a speech, though you would not have guessed from this that there’d been much of a chapel choir at Merton in recent years, still less that it once had Emma Kirkby in it! As I looked round the chapel I wondered how long it will be before the painting on the ceiling is finally removed or painted over.

I wish the new foundation well and hope to hear it once it’s established. I think there should be enough potential candidates around with both the vocal and academic ability to fill places in it. I’m less sure that there are enough to give Oxford the vocal culture that Cambridge had, with many good mixed choirs comparing standards with one another, and borrowing and poaching singers between choirs.

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

second-hand sheet music

Posted on September 24, 2007 by vhk10

I was in Oxford at the weekend and, since I needed to get hold of a vocal score of the Mikado, thought I might look for a second-hand one. But second-hand sheet music is now hard to find on sale in shops on the street. Blackwell’s Music Shop used to have a large bookcase of it, but that has gone. I suspect it disappeared when the shop moved from Holywell St. to the Broad a few years ago; at the same time the balance between shelf space for sheet music and for CDs seems to have shifted in favour of the latter. With the (relatively recent) closure of Russell Acott’s and the (longer ago) closure of Taphouse’s, there are now no other specialist music shops in central Oxford (I would love to be corrected on this).

I had a look in some second-hand bookshops but drew a blank on music except in the Oxfam bookshop on St. Giles’, which had a few bankers’ boxes of it. (The Oxfam bookshop on the Triangle in Bristol is rather better supplied in that respect). Perhaps I tried the wrong places and again I’d love to be corrected.

I suppose second-hand sheet music has largely moved to being sold on-line or from catalogues. This is a pity because it doesn’t allow you to drop in and browse during a shopping trip. I imagine a large proportion of it is almost unsaleable, being stuff that has fallen out of the repertoire, and so not worth the rental cost of the shop space.

Posted in category-defying | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Composers’ political compass

Posted on September 17, 2007 by vhk10

I’ve had my attention drawn to this page on the Political Compass website. It is, as they say, ‘largely for amusement’. I’m not sure they really have Elgar right – I think his position is derived from judgements based on his music rather than from his expressed views. And I don’t think we can be very sure Haydn was an authoritarian; since he earned his living largely as a courtier he had to be careful what he said.

We are having a look at the Independent‘s current series of booklet biographies of composers, but could think of quite a few people we’d be more interested in reading about than Puccini.

Posted in on the Web | Tagged , , | Leave a comment