the golden age of compound time

Posted on April 4, 2007 by vhk10

As I was singing the opening chorus of the St. Matthew Passion a thought occurred to me: why did it go wrong for compound time after the baroque period? Why did later composers use it less, apart from niche markets such as berceuse, siciliano and barcarolle? If Bach could write a powerful, dynamic opening movement to a huge work in 12/8 time, why couldn’t others? (‘Because he was J. S. Bach’ is the obvious answer to this one I suppose). Am I actually totally wrong here and overlooking lots of later examples of substantial movements in compound time? Does it turn up more in e.g. Italian opera because it accommodates feminine endings easily?

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G’s and Z’s

Posted on March 27, 2007 by vhk10

Plenty of these in the name of one of the composers in the most recent Chandos Singers concert: Grzegorz Gerwazy Gorczycki, whose Conductus (an assortment of settings of mostly funerary texts) we performed. The other substantial single piece was Lalande’s Super flumina Babilonis, an unexpurgated setting of this psalm. Not being a specialist in French baroque, I hadn’t sung any Lalande before, although our Charpentier at Christmas prompted me to go out and buy a recording, and to discover that Charpentier is surprisingly under-represented on the shelves of the local CD shop.

After Christmas I knew it would only be a matter of time before I sang Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque, and this opened the concert. Another piece I associate with the Exultate Singers is Ginastera’s Lamentations of Jeremiah, with which we opened the second half.

We ended with three anthems by Purcell. I see that people have come to this blog a few times recently by searching on Jehova quam multi sunt hostes mei and I’m proud to be associated in an indirect way with this stunning anthem. I’m not quite so enamoured of Blow up the Trumpet, which rather feels as if it has been put together out of lots of left-over bits of other anthems. And that’s not the only reason it doesn’t come round much; if Purcell would write a piece with three tenor parts, what did he expect? Our third Purcell anthem was the extended O Sing unto the Lord.

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at the school jumble sale

Posted on March 27, 2007 by vhk10

This year I helped to run the bookstall at the school jumble sale. Among all the chick-lit, thrillers, airport reading and the like there was just one book relating to music: the Cambridge Opera Guide to Wozzeck. As I withdrew this from sale with (almost certainly unnecessary) haste to add to my own pile of purchases, I reflected: why is it that Berg’s music seems to follow me around wherever I go and whatever I do? Or is it just that one notices such occurrences if they involve a favourite composer? Or is it that the guide to this particular opera sold relatively well because it’s thought to need more explanation than others, and also the guide is more likely to be discarded later?
[June 2013: something similar happened at the church fête]

Meanwhile I have been learning Haydn’s The Spirit’s Song. This is clearly a close relative of his great piano Variations in F minor, written a year or two earlier, and not just because of the key (I think this is the original one).

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a holding message

Posted on March 20, 2007 by vhk10

Due to a lack of suitable lunchtimes I haven’t had much chance to write new entries recently. It’s not that I’m losing interest. Over the next few weeks I hope to cover:

  • the latest Chandos Singers concert
  • a performance of the St. Matthew Passion
  • two performances of the same great anthem by Purcell
  • (possibly) Rossini’s Stabat Mater
  • a quick return visit to St. Alban’s Cathedral

amongst any other things that occur to me. Watch this space!

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technorati.com

Posted on March 13, 2007 by vhk10

At the moment, this blog gets a steady 20 visits or so per day with something over a quarter being return visits by people who’ve been before. But my rating on
Technorati remains very low (today at 2,763,168) because no one’s has linked to it recently or listed it as a favourite. I realise it’s never going to have very high traffic – nor would I (or our sysadmin!) want it to – but I’d like to think that there aren’t really 2,763,167 better blogs listed on Technorati. So I’d love to be nominated by some Technorati members – if it is a favourite, of course.

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two familiar pieces for Ash Wednesday

Posted on February 26, 2007 by vhk10

Just a brief note until I can prepare some longer entries. On Ash Wednesday we sang two very familiar pieces: Allegri’s Miserere and parts of Byrd’s 4-Part Mass. I know both pieces very thoroughly, but as it happens I haven’t sung either for several years. I sang the Byrd more than once at weddings of friends, though I never felt that the mood of the piece was quite right for this. There is a deep melancholy to it, I suppose because it was written for clandestine performance under persecution. But I think the couples concerned felt that the alternative for the performers they’d got was Darke in F! The Byrd is more suited to Ash Wednesday.

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Birmingham falls

Posted on February 24, 2007 by vhk10

This blog proved its usefulness when a reader saw that I wanted to sing in Birmingham Cathedral and suggested that I join his choir (the Peterborough Chamber Choir) for a weekend of services there.

Evensong on the Saturday had a Russian theme. I had my work cut out to learn the words to Rachmaninov’s setting of the Magnificat, especially the line with three instances of the ‘pushchair’ sound. (Had the Russians ever taken over and rewritten our signs in Cyrillic, the one on Ashchurch railway station would have become much shorter). Rachmaninov set the Mag and Nunc texts, but rather carelessly neglected to write a setting of the responses for Anglican evensong, so one of the choir has done this for him by adapting bits of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. We sang his Praise the Lord from the Heavens as an introit. I have a strongly polarised attitude to Rachmaninov’s music which I should write about another time.

This choir goes in for mixing and matching settings by different composers, so at the Eucharist the Gloria was by Henry Smart, the Sanctus and Benedictus by Antony Milner and the Agnus Dei (in French) by Rupert Lang. At the final evensong we did Victoria’s Magnificat on the first tone for double choir, with a Nunc by Bax. All of these were new to me; I could see why I hadn’t sung the Victoria before, given the number of parts it requires. Yet another new piece was Anthony Piccolo’s setting of Jesus Christ the apple tree.

Birmingham was the first new cathedral for me since 2004. It leaves Wakefield, Bradford and Leicester as the only CofE Cathedrals in England I haven’t sung in.

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Vengerov at the 2007 Bath Festival

Posted on February 23, 2007 by vhk10

A friend emails me about a forthcoming concert of traditional music at the Bath Festival this year. It’s not uncommon for performers to advertise their appearance at the festival in advance of the release of the official programme. Probably with a bit of constructive searching I could already find out quite a lot of what’s going to be on. But I visited the Festival website just to check whether the programme was out yet (today – February 23rd).

It isn’t, but I learn from the website that tickets are already on sale for Maxim Vengerov and a couple of other concerts. This seems to have been done rather quietly – we are on the mailing list for the Bath Festival and have heard nothing!

[24 May: It turned out that tickets for a few concerts went on sale early as part of a promotion by the Bath Chronicle. I went to the Vengerov concert which was originally going to go out live on Radio 3, before he had to scale back his involvement in it because of a shoulder injury. It was decided late on to record it instead. Had it gone out live, the radio audience would have had a bit of a wait, because at 7.40 we were still filing in large numbers into the Forum – an art deco former cinema. The main reason for the hold-up seems to have been that people had forgotten, or didn’t know, that there’s less parking in the surrounding area at the moment than there has been in the past! An account of the performances will follow later.]

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Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky

Posted on February 23, 2007 by vhk10

In previous posts I dealt with the BBC’s airing of the complete works of Beethoven and Bach. This time it was the turn of Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky, done jointly. I rather dipped in and out of this, though I tried to make sure I heard favourite pieces that aren’t often broadcast. Often I used ‘Listen Again’ for this, as it was difficult to home in on a particular piece. For Beethoven and Bach, the timings of all pieces were given to the minute in the Radio Times and online, but not this time – so you had to estimate the running time of other, often unfamiliar, pieces to be able to hear the one you wanted. In the process I heard a fair amount of lesser-known works and decided that on the whole I prefer obscure Stravinsky to obscure Tchaikovsky.

One reason for not listening systematically this time was that the airwaves could be taken over by a long and uninteresting work. The less successful works of Bach and Beethoven are much shorter than, say, The Maid of Orleans. I have to admit here that I also prefer my Tchaikovsky ballet scores as highlights; the full versions contain passages that you wouldn’t notice if they accompanied dancing, but which don’t stand up so well in concert. There are few major works by either composer that I won’t happily listen to, the exception being some of the neo-classical Stravinsky, which irritates me for reasons I don’t really understand.

I was left at the end wondering whether the whole exercise was really a way of distracting listeners from the drastic changes to the Radio 3 schedules which followed. I got more Russian music at the end of the week.

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Lassus – or is it?

Posted on February 9, 2007 by vhk10

For Candlemas last week we sang a Mass setting new to me: Lassus’ Mon cœur se recommande à vous. I’ve sung surprisingly little by Lassus – I’m not really sure why not – and it’s arguable that I still haven’t sung very much, since this setting is also attributed to Eccard. Whoever wrote it had a liking for taking the sopranos back up for some high notes just when you think a phrase is going to come down and end. Also new to me was Victoria’s setting of the Nunc Dimittis.

On Saturday I went to hear the visiting choir at the Abbey – one of the RSCM choirs conducted by David Ogden. For reasons I won’t go into here, I had with me a rocking horse, which was a model member of the congregation as it stayed put throughout. Which is more than can be said for most of those at the back of Bath Abbey – about forty people came and went during the service (the rest of the congregation near the front was completely stable). Perhaps this was because it wasn’t clear outside the Abbey that a service was taking place (what happened to the noticeboard that used to be placed outside when there was a visiting choir? This time the service wasn’t mentioned on the Abbey music list on display either) and there was also some confusion about what time the service was.

I’ve enquired about the ‘Chorus Angelorum’ which will be singing at a forthcoming performances of the St. Matthew Passion. [update – I shall now be singing in this] If you aren’t in the right choirs you don’t get to hear about one-offs like this and have to take the initiative in asking whether singers are needed.

First posting with the upgraded software from Movable Type and it’s lovely to have an official spam filter which I can adjust, rather than my own home-made one which I had to use before.

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on the move again

Posted on January 30, 2007 by vhk10

The server this lives on is being shut down and I’ll have to move it to another one. There may be a period when it’s offline. If I can post the new URL before shutdown I will and I’ll email regular commenters, otherwise search engines should catch up with the new location before too long.

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the greatest monotone I’ve performed

Posted on January 24, 2007 by vhk10

I got the chance to sing this recently: the long note in the treble line which sets the letter ‘Beth’ in Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah.

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