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.

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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!

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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!)

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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more singing for the famous

Posted on September 14, 2007 by vhk10

I don’t knowingly do much of this but got another such engagement later in the week – singing in a small choir at Bel Mooney’s wedding.  This was my first encounter with the book of wedding anthems edited by Judy Martin, who grew up in the same village as me. Music included Mozart’s Laudate Dominum, in which I did part of the solo.

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Savitri

Posted on September 8, 2007 by vhk10

I did something rather out of the ordinary last weekend and sang in a private performance of this one-act opera by Holst. I have rather mixed feelings about Holst’s music in general; there are delicate pieces such as the Nunc Dimittis or the Ave Maria, and others which rely too much on great clunky bass lines marching down a scale (I’m thinking of the intro to Personent Hodie – which unfortunately was our school carol – or Turn Back O man). I find the latter a wearisome device, but at least it is at least absent from Savitri.

It is a three-hander with a wordless off-stage female chorus (that’s where I came into it), in which the heroine Savitri persuades Death not to take the life of her husband Satyavan. I wasn’t the only person who thought of Gerontius for both subject matter and musical style, and I was particularly reminded of the section near the end when Gerontius hears the voices of his friends back on earth. Savitri’s bargaining with Death also recalled the long scene between Brünnhilde and Wotan in Walküre. In among this there are modal folk-style melodies which Savitri and Satyavan sing to one another.

My prose couldn’t do justice to the catering that accompanied this event. I didn’t really mingle with the guests but one who spoke to me was the widow of someone well-known who died suddenly exactly ten years ago this week. I couldn’t help wondering afterwards how she found the opera, given its subject matter.

I’d heard of the work before, but all too often the name is mispronounced with the stress on the second syllable. Holst set it correctly on the first one.

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Proms 60 and 66

Posted on September 4, 2007 by vhk10

My husband and daughter went to both of these. Prom 60 was the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra playing Also sprach Zarathustra and Sibelius 2. The verdict was that the Strauss was rather rambling but the Sibelius went down well. Prom 66 was the Vienna Philharmonic with Schubert’s 5th and Bruckner’s 4th symphonies, and the VPO under Barenboim seemed to be on fine form.

Now a question for those who follow the Proms closely: why are they a week earlier than usual this year? In 2001 they ended on September 15th, but this year they end on September 8th. Is it because there are more competing concerts on in September than in July? The week just before the Proms start can be a terribly fallow period for concerts in London.

I’m sure I heard the BBC announcer say that one of the members of the VPO claims to be descended from Bruckner. Wow! And there I was thinking that Bruckner’s love-life was the empty set! They really shouldn’t leave us in suspense like that.

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Laved, illumined

Posted on August 27, 2007 by vhk10

I sang these words as part of the rather contrived acrostic hymn for St. Bartholomew at Norwich Cathedral during the Cathedral Chamber Choir’s week there. I joined part way through and so missed such delights as Rose in C minor. However, there were other new pieces for me: firstly, Sheppard’s Libera nos, salva nos. Astonishingly, I think I have only sung Sheppard’s music once before, as a student.

On Sunday morning I performed Finzi’s Welcome, sweet and sacred feast for the first time. This is a lovely piece: like a less dramatic version of Lo the Full, Final Sacrifice (in fact when sight-reading the piece and unsure of notes, I would sing phrases from that and this generally worked). I can’t speak for the other voices, but the soprano line felt as if it could be a solo song without much re-arrangement. I think Finzi didn’t do himself any favours by writing two large-scale anthems about the Eucharist, ensuring one gets performed far less often than the other.

At evensong on Sunday our anthem was Lo! God is here by Philip Moore. This was the first time I’d ever sung anything by him although his music is on my wishlist, and remains there after my first experience of it!

Other music included Gibbons’ madrigal-like O Lord, in thy wrath and Noble in B minor, which I now associate too much with childbirth to enjoy singing.

We did some extra-mural singing while processing in and out of the labyrinth in the cloister. In practice, this turned into Eveline and Locus iste, which everyone knew the parts to. A video of this is doing the rounds.

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Prom 45

Posted on August 22, 2007 by vhk10

I went with my daughter to this Prom (BBCSO conducted by Knussen) and I think we chose well.

We enjoyed Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces the most. I don’t know these as well as I should; they’re a bit less in-your-face than Berg’s Three Pieces which I heard a couple of years ago.

This year’s violin concerto (I’ve heard several of these at the Proms over the years) was Knussen’s own. I think I wasn’t in the best location to appreciate this as the orchestra seemed to overpower the soloist at times. The new piece by Henze was unobjectionable without containing anything that couldn’t have been written thirty years ago.

The Rite of Spring was performed in the later revision, and I rather missed the rawness of the original version. This performance favoured tone colour over drama. Now was whoever put the inflatable dinosaur in the fountain thinking of the use of this music in Fantasia? And do the lights at the very top of the Royal Albert Hall always change colour from yellow to purple and back again for each piece performed?

These days if you collect tickets from the box office you must produce the card you booked them with, which means you can’t buy them for someone else (unless you give them your card for the evening). The Guardian reviewed the concert here.

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