failure

Posted on January 12, 2006 by vhk10

This entry is an attempt to explain further one of my musical New Year’s resolutions.

From time to time, there’s been something in my choral life that didn’t work out as I’d have liked. E.g. being dropped from a choir or from a particular concert, never being considered for a solo, or failing an audition. All of these things have happened to me at some point in the last few years; in writing what follows I do not have any one particular incident in mind.

On many occasions it’s not hard to see why. It may have been at a time when I wasn’t singing well, or there may have just been lots of other better singers around. On the other hand, you can’t exclude the possibility of having been accidentally overlooked (which certainly has happened to me) or of favouritism – not unknown! But in between that there is a grey area of instances where I’ve been left wondering why the axe fell (so to speak) on me and not on another, since it’s rare to be given a reason, even though you can hardly fail to notice when one of these things has happened to you.

Part of the reason for having singing lessons is for someone else to identify and iron out the problems I can’t hear for myself. But what about the flaws which only become apparent in a choir? Some are so perennial that there’s no need to make a special resolution; it’s always possible to be a better sight-singer. Others are more insidious. It was reflecting on this that made me decide to make 2006 the year that I really concentrated on how to come off phrases.

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a calendrical plea

Posted on January 9, 2006 by vhk10

This isn’t really related to music, but someone reading it may be able to help.

Every year I buy a calendar with photographs of British Cathedrals. The format has varied – perhaps they haven’t all been produced by the same publisher – but it’s often been called ‘Cathedrals and Greater Churches of Britain’. I like to buy it when singing in a Cathedral with a visiting choir, along with Christmas cards depicting the Cathedral, so I can support it.

This year I drew a blank. Neither of the Cathedrals I sang at in the summer (York and Chester) were selling such a calendar for 2006. When I went to Exeter in October I found a Cathedrals calendar on sale but it was illustrated with paintings and I really wanted photographs. Wells and Bath Abbey don’t sell it and I haven’t found one on sale over the internet.

So if anyone has seen such a calendar on sale, especially if there are still copies on sale now, I’d be interested to know! There’s a barren expanse of kitchen wall where it usually hangs.

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Mein Gott, Vorsprung durch Technik

Posted on January 7, 2006 by vhk10

This was the name of an imaginary cantata in Private Eye‘s version of the Radio 3 listings during the Bach Christmas, in which only J.S. Bach was broadcast on Radio 3 for ten days.

When there was a similar exercise for Beethoven, we thought that doing the same for Bach would make the listener feel as if they were spending the week in church. It did feel like that sometimes, especially at a time of year when I’m singing in church a lot anyway. When I turned the radio off I could still hear in my head a choir bursting out into a vigorous four-square chorale harmonisation, or a soloist delivering some recitative before launching into an aria interwined with an instrumental obbligato. But the balance between sacred and secular was maintained and those 24 hours of organ music were well spaced out (I think a lot of it was in the middle of the night). I did get to hear my favourite chorale prelude, BWV 721, tucked in among longer pieces.

The programmers had an inclusive attitude to dubia, and these provided some entertainment as we tried to work out why they might not be by J.S. Bach, or in some cases how anyone could have thought that they were. With Beethoven there were some pieces where his inspiration clearly flagged, but it would have been hard to find much of that among Bach’s works.

This time the piece that kept coming round was the famous Chaconne from one of the violin partitas. I heard several versions, though I must have missed the arrangement for piano by Busoni as I can’t imagine they didn’t play it.

Some final impressions:
– I am fairly familiar with Bach’s instrumental music and the major choral works, but much less so with the cantatas. I’ve probably sung in performances about ten of them. (But then I’ve not sung in the B minor Mass as a soprano, a proper performance of the St Matthew Passion, or the Christmas Oratorio either).
– the Moog synthesiser now has the status of a historical instrument
– (purists stop reading) other things being equal, I prefer Bach on the piano to the harpsichord!

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2005’s and 2006’s resolutions

Posted on December 30, 2005 by vhk10

2005 was bound to be a pretty quiet year for singing and I didn’t make many resolutions. So I didn’t get to any new cathedrals, or sing anything from the wishlist (though I did sing several pieces new to me). I did however do something about the ‘all purpose low note’ I wrote about a year ago, and it’s now largely been replaced by notes of a determinate pitch.

So what are the wishes for 2006?
a) to perform in at least one of the four remaining C of E cathedrals in England: Birmingham Cathedral, Leicester Cathedral, Bradford Cathedral or Wakefield Cathedral.
b) again, to sing something from the wishlist
c) to get opportunities to perform at the level I was doing before Magnus’ birth, either with the Exultate Singers or elsewhere. One such opportunity will be the Bath Camerata’s Good Friday concert, though I don’t expect it to lead to more
d) related to the last I suppose, but also a repeat: to sing in the Bath Festival Chorus, which was not practical for me to do in 2005
e) having got rid of the all-purpose low note, to work on another weak point in my choral singing. I need to watch more, especially at the ends of phrases! This is related to a general tendency to lose interest at phrase ends; I sometimes catch myself in a ‘been there, done that’ attitude when I get to them.
f) to learn some demanding new solo repertoire. There are a number of such pieces which I’ve been putting off for a few years. Perhaps 2006 should be the year to tackle some of them.

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carols inside and out

Posted on December 25, 2005 by vhk10

This Christmas I did some outdoor carol singing, something I don’t do every year. First came half an hour of carols to the shoppers at Bath’s Christmas market. We got some appreciative comments as we explored the limits of the Carols for Choirs arrangements for unaccompanied singing. The tricky one is the arrangement of We wish you a merry Christmas which goes up to a top B flat!

(I once did some pre-Christmas carol singing in one of the main shopping arcades in Manchester, for which the choir funds received a handsome cheque. ‘Don’t think of the notes’, our conductor said, ‘think of the banknotes!’).

On Christmas Eve it was carol singing door to door in the village where we are spending Christmas. In previous years the leader of the group tended to pitch the carols very low, forcing me to sing bits an octave up. This time it had been taken over by a tenor, so no such problem. We raised nearly a hundred pounds for charity.

In between I sang at St. Mary’s Bathwick’s Nine Lessons and Carols service, performing alongside ‘Bathwick Brass’ (who this year included a percussionist). I nearly pulled out of this because I’d had little voice the previous week. It’s a few years since I cancelled a singing engagement altogether for this sort of reason, though there have arguably been times – particularly in autumn 2004 – when I should have done. This time, as usual, the low notes were the first to go and the quiet high notes were the last to come back.

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how conductors react to this blog

Posted on December 20, 2005 by vhk10

There are two main responses: some can’t wait to read my writeups of performances and tell other choir members to read them too. Others aren’t so keen on any potential source of publicity for the choir that isn’t under their control.

I have a policy of not reviewing performances I’ve taken part in and I also think of the potential reaction of people involved in the choir and of those who run the performance venue. In practice this means that my accounts are largely based around repertoire: what was new to me, difficulties I had in learning or performing it, how it compares to other things I’ve sung.
I will also now refrain from writing about a particular event, apart from noting that I took part in it, if I’m asked to do so on behalf of a choir that I sing in. Obviously I don’t want to put my place in the choir in jeopardy by saying anything that will give offence. On the other hand, it’s surely a good thing if choir members take time to reflect on what they’re asked to perform rather than singing it unthinkingly.

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an Exultate Singers Christmas concert

Posted on December 17, 2005 by vhk10

On Wednesday I went to a Christmas concert in aid of cancer research at St. Mary Redcliffe church (for the first time in years I’m not singing in such as concert myself this year). Carol concerts lie on a continuum between services and concerts. Unlike pure concerts, they may include prayers and congregational hymns, but unlike services you have to pay to attend! This one was definitely at the ‘service’ end of the continuum. (A less satisfactory one was a concert I performed in at Bath’s Theatre Royal a few years ago, where we (choir and orchestra) sang to an embarrassingly small audience in the theatre stalls.)

This time the Exultate Singers sang several items on their own as well as leading the hymns, all known to me, and some of which I sang with them last year. The length of the nave was well used in Britten’s Hymn to the Virgin. The choir is singing another concert in St James Priory church on December 22nd and also has a new CD out. Details are on the choir website.

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après l’entracte, le Déluge

Posted on December 9, 2005 by vhk10

Last Saturday I joined the Chandos Singers again for a programme of French (composer or language) secular music (nice to have a concert in December that isn’t taken over by Christmas). I’d never sung any of it before.

I say ‘secular’ despite several pieces having sacred texts. Probably the most sincerely religious setting in the evening was the two chunks of Poulenc’s Stabat Mater that he set before the rest. A mediæval motet about Balaam suddently turned into a skit about speakers of English. Moulinié’s motet Congratulamini mihi omnes can be adapted for any saint’s day – provided the saint’s name doesn’t contain too many syllables – but the exclamations O amor! O voluptas! in the middle suggested that the author of the text had other things on his mind. As for Saint-Saëns’ Le Déluge, the sins of antedeluvian humanity and their gruesome punishment were dwelt on at such length that I wonder whether the author really hoped that contemporary Parisians might meet the same fate.

I had a part in a section for quartet (though six of us performed it) in Le Déluge. It’s the sort of piece that it’s impossible not to ham up a bit, and is one of those compositions whose premiere was disrupted by members of the audience objecting to the amount of dissonance it contained. Hasn’t really changed my attitude to Saint-Saëns though.

We also did among other things Lauridsen’s Chansons des Roses, in which my main difficulty was that the soprano line often lay very low. The fourth setting is so similar in its harmonic progressions to his O Magnum Mysterium that I’m not sure that with a bit of transposition the two pieces couldn’t happily be performed simultaneously.

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what’s the choir called?

Posted on December 2, 2005 by vhk10

From time to time I’m recruited to a performance at a sufficiently late stage that I don’t find out the name of the group I’m singing with till the day! This happened last Saturday when I joined the Marshfield Bach Singers for a concert which included various choral favourites such as the Laudate Dominum from Mozart’s Solemn Vespers and Brahms’ How lovely are thy dwellings, as well as Haydn’s Little Organ Mass (which I was glad to sing without the expansions this time). There was one piece new to me: a Sancta Maria, Mater Dei by Mozart. It was the first time I’d sung with an orchestra since the concert with the Exultate Singers and Bath Baroque in January.

Meanwhile, I’ve had an invitation to sing in the expanded Bath Camerata’s Good Friday 2006 concert and am delighted to see two works which have long been on my wishlist: Janacek’s Otcenas and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. The choir has been expanded less frequently in recent years so all the more reason to sing, in case it’s the last such event.
[It seems to have been, as the choir no longer keeps a list of former singers]

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Mozartfest 2005 (2)

Posted on November 25, 2005 by vhk10

I went to hear the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson trio in the Guildhall. This concert made me realise that with some famous exceptions my knowledge of the piano trio repertoire is very limited and there is lots of wonderful stuff that is unfamiliar. The trios we heard were Mozart’s K502, Mendelssohn’s Op.66 and Brahms’ Op.87. I felt the Mendelssohn came off best of the three.

My husband went to two other concerts: firstly, Stephen Kovacevich playing Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert which was certainly one of the highlights of the Mozartfest this year. To our knowledge he hadn’t performed in Bath in the last decade at least.

On Thursday the Lott/Murray recital was replaced by Ian Bostridge singing Die Schöne Müllerin. My husband took a party of mathematicians, none of whom seemed to have any cause for complaint about the substitution!

I get a bit more Mozart this weekend as there are a couple of pieces by him in a concert I’m singing in. Perhaps one day the Bath Festival Chorus will be used in the Mozartfest again.

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Mozartfest 2005 (1)

Posted on November 18, 2005 by vhk10

How much alcohol is there in a Mozartkugel? I had to ponder this question when about to buy one for my daughter as an interval treat. (Although there is some rum or similar flavouring, I suspect that flavouring is all it is).

Between us we went to five concerts. I attended the Takács Quartet’s opening concert in the Assembly Rooms, which now have a canopy around, though not over, the performers – a bit like what you might see on top of a four-poster bed or an altar in a rather grand Catholic church. Maybe this was to help the sound; from where I was sitting (about halfway back, on the right), it came over a little bottom-heavy. I enjoyed the Debussy string quartet most in their programme which also contained Mozart’s Dissonance quartet and Beethoven’s Op.127.

On Saturday others in the family went to hear the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Thomas Zehetmair, and got the impression that many of their regular players may have stayed in London.

I’ll write about the other concerts we went to next time.

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performing in costume

Posted on November 10, 2005 by vhk10

A trip to Vienna and Venice last month showed up something common to the musical lives of those two places: a profusion of concerts in period costume. In Vienna this usually means the time of Mozart (I expect next year you won’t be able to move for them) or Johann Strauss the younger; in Venice it’s Vivaldi, generally the Four Seasons. I wonder who goes to these concerts – any individuals or just pre-booked tour parties? And do the performers feel terribly self-conscious, and if so does this eventually wear off? I’ve no reason to suppose the performances themselves aren’t perfectly acceptable.

This particular musical trend doesn’t seem to have infected Britain, with the exception of some performances of Messiah at Christmas time and possibly the occasional Johann Strauss gala.

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