a move

Posted on July 29, 2005 by vhk10

So here we are on devbox, as the old server had to be shut down. I’ve upgraded to a new version of the software so the look and feel is slightly different. I may adjust it a bit over the next few weeks (not least so that I don’t have to type into a narrow box as I’m doing now).

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pieces I’ve sung: Spem in Alium

Posted on July 18, 2005 by vhk10

A comment on my last posting prompts me to write about Tallis’ Spem in Alium. This was something of a cult piece when I was in Cambridge and all three performances I’ve sung in were there. The only one under really satisfactory conditions (I had a soprano line to myself) was at a wedding (!). Another was with the Cambridge Taverner Choir, transposed up a tone; I sang an alto line and struggled to project it when it went below the stave. The third involved more than forty performers and I shared the soprano 1 part with another singer – unfortunately the parts had been assigned in an arbitrary way so that those who had a line to themselves could not necessarily hold it!

Performances don’t seem to happen so often in these parts and were virtually unknown in Manchester when I lived there (and I suppose if they hadn’t been the soprano parts would have been taken by the eight sopranos who sang in everything).

I have rather mixed feelings about Spem as a piece of music. It doesn’t come over well on a recording (I’ll describe an exception to this below). Even in live performance I find much of the interest comes from seeing how the music is distributed around the eight choirs rather than in the vocal lines themselves, although they are more rhythmically complex than one might think.

A few years ago there was an installation in the cloisters at Salisbury Cathedral. A performance of Spem had been recorded, Swingle-style, with one microphone per singer. The resulting forty tracks were played through forty speakers, arranged at about head height on stands and disposed as the singers would be in performance. Visitors to the Cathedral found this intriguing and wandered round the eight groups of five speakers. I enjoyed it too, though for me the experience was nothing new – it was like being in the middle of a choir performing the work.

It’s so long since I’ve sung this piece and my score of it is gathering dust propped up awkwardly in a corner. I’d love to explore one of the soprano lines I haven’t done (that is, any except first and fifth choirs).

[I did get to sing it in April 2009. Read about it here].

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two new composers

Posted on July 8, 2005 by vhk10

There are by my reckoning few major composers whose music I’ve never performed in public. Many of them are Eastern European, and I was able to fill one glaring gap last weekend by singing some Janacek with the Chandos Singers. The piece in question was his unfinished Mass setting. I have a recording of this with Westminster Cathedral Choir, but we used a different reconstruction which among other things put it in E rather than E flat. It may not count as an important work, but many turns of phrase are distinctive and telling and Janacek is as attentive to matching words to rhythm in Latin as in Czech.

Fux is a lesser composer whose music I’d never performed either till last Saturday. We also sang a wodge of Tallis motets (that was bound to happen to me sooner or later this year – will I get to sing Spem in Alium before the year is out?), and motets by Vivaldi and Monteverdi, ending with a novelty item which set composers’ names to a movement of Vivaldi’s Gloria.

On Monday I went to an enjoyable concert by the Exultate Singers in Bristol, with a general ‘jazz’ theme and including pieces I’d sung with the choir as well as pieces I’d sung with other groups and others new to me. But I realise that however well it is performed I am always going to fail to appreciate the music of Delius.

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Cheltenham’s secret

Posted on July 2, 2005 by vhk10

Last year I realised that the Cheltenham Music Festival was within striking distance, and put myself on the mailing list. But as a way of finding out about the 2005 Music Festival this was a failure. I never a received a brochure about the Festival, and the website was down for most of the last week. (The Festival started yesterday.) I tried emailing Cheltenham council – the best I could do in the absence of a website – to request a brochure, but haven’t received one yet. I can now find out about concerts from the website, but it’s probably too late now to plan to go to any of them.

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a May week concert

Posted on June 29, 2005 by vhk10

A week ago, during a brief visit to Cambridge, we were able to go to Corpus’ May Week concert. For anyone there, we were the couple with the baby! Here I should thank Dan Soper, the senior Organ Scholar, and Brenda Wright and Simon Smith in the Bursars’ Office, for getting tickets to us at short notice. As in my time the event was divided into a formal concert in the Hall and a sequence of unaccompanied partsongs over refreshments in Old Court afterwards. The balance seems now to have shifted towards the first part; I recall once singing half a dozen partsongs in Old Court and then rounding off with Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia (!).

The first part was almost entirely music by Elgar and Purcell giving a chance for a head-to-head comparison: which has the better claim to being the greatest English composer? I know many might also make a claim for Britten (to say nothing of others such as Byrd), but somehow I can’t put him in the same league as the other two, though I’d be hard put to say why. I once sang Elgar at a Corpus May Week concert – From the Bavarian Highlands, which was an inspired choice. This time he was represented by partsongs and his Serenade for Strings, which of course are relatively minor pieces in his output. But even adding in major works, I’d still award the title to Purcell, though I wouldn’t argue with anyone who wanted to give it to Elgar. (I am in company with the presenter of ‘Composer of the Week’ this week on Radio 3, available for a week on ‘Listen Again’ to anyone who wants to test Purcell’s claims). My only reservation about Purcell is the inconsistent quality of the words he sets, but the same is true of Schubert.
Corpus chapel choir has varied in standard over the years, but seemed on the evidence of this concert to be in one of its better phases.

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a week of Beethoven

Posted on June 12, 2005 by vhk10

Even Choral Evensong had to make way for this! Radio 3 has just come to the end of its week of Beethoven, which broadcast the composer’s entire works and nothing else. Turning on in the middle of the night, as we did, you would still hear only LvB.

Many works came round more than once, and not just the well-known ones. (What was it with the overture to The Consecration of the House? This was broadcast at least four times!) It was possible to hear various versions (I heard the Grosse Fuge four times, in different contexts or arrangements) or works which use the same theme, such as the one from the Eroica finale. (I consider the piano variations on this theme to be the equal of all but the greatest of the sonatas). And that brings me to one of the things you learn from this exercise – just how many sets of variations Beethoven wrote, not to mention folksong arrangements, which are a bit out of favour these days. I never found out what the curious song with the almost endlessly repeated vocal arpeggios (broadcast on Friday afternoon) actually was!

One way and another we heard a high proportion of the week’s output and thought it was a very worthwhile exercise in broadcasting. We couldn’t think of another composer for which it would work as well – Bach, for example, would come out as too churchy if you put out his complete surviving works (and what do you do about dubious attributions, of which there are quite a few?). And it would probably take over a week – the organ music alone lasts 24 hours. With Mozart you would get a lot of juvenile works and maybe not enough variety.

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two piano recitals

Posted on June 11, 2005 by vhk10

I attended two piano recitals during the Bath Festival. The first was Freddy Kempf playing Beethoven and Chopin in a programme consisting entirely of music I have known well for a long time. I wasn’t very happy with the performances, especially of the Beethoven, because of a tendency to pound the keyboard and some peculiar rubato. I felt that he was best in the gentler passages of the Chopin (Op. 25 Études), where there was no temptation to be aggressive. At least he repeated the introduction in the first movement of the Pathétique sonata. (The other work in the programme was the Appassionata). I should add that most of the audience seemed to like the recital more than I did.

A week later I returned to the Assembly Rooms to hear Angela Hewitt play. I’m now used enough to Bach on the harpsichord that I don’t feel quite at ease with performances on the piano as a rule, though these won me over. She made light of the difficulties of playing on a different instrument, such as the abrupt changes of dynamic required in the absence of a second manual in the French Overture. After the interval she played Ravel’s Sonatine and Liszt’s Sonata. Again the Sonata is a work I know and love very well. Even if you hadn’t known that Hewitt’s a Bach specialist, you might have guessed it from the relish with which she attacked the fugal section! My only reservation was that I found some of the slower passages dragged a bit and as a result the internal argument of the sonata was broken up.

My husband went to hear the Hagen Quartet. The major work in their recital was Beethoven’s op. 135 (I heard the same quartet play this work in the Wigmore Hall a few years ago); he enjoyed the performances but found the programming unsatisfactory, in that the final work was a relatively minor composition by Schumann which didn’t really stand up to comparison with the rest of the programme.

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more MacMillan in Julian Road

Posted on June 4, 2005 by vhk10

The Bath Festival Chorus has re-formed this year, and on Monday I went to hear them with James MacMillan conducting music by himself and others.

Inevitably I found myself comparing the account of the Canticos Sagrados with the Exultate Singers’ performance I sang in last September. I started doing this even before the piece began – we had to get our opening notes from the organ part! Setting aside direct comparisons, I got to hear properly the interplay of different voices rather than concentrating on my own part. It became clearer how the long held notes I’d sung in the second and third movements supported the other voices.

I was less impressed by the Westminster Mass, but I was hearing a concert performance of extracts from a work that is really for liturgical use and perhaps works better in that setting.

The programme also included the Magnificat from Tippett’s St. John’s College setting (a setting I’d love to sing one day), a Bruckner motet, Britten’s Te Deum in E (which I’ve sung once, in York Minster), and Poulenc’s Litanies à la Vierge Noire (I would have liked some rather more French-sounding vowels here – there’s been no shortage of the language on Bath’s streets this last week, as it must be half-term on the other side of the Channel). But in general it was an impressively ambitious programme to bring off. From what I could see of MacMillan (his back) he appeared to conduct precisely and without extravagant gestures.

The Festival Chorus seems smaller than it used to be, which may be why it sometimes sounded thin in some voices. It’s the only choir of that size I know of which doesn’t have a web page as a means of advertising and recruitment! I still regret not accepting an offer to join some years back and I’ll now have to wait till the 2006 Festival.

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more MacMillan in Redcliffe

Posted on May 29, 2005 by vhk10

I was able to sing in two of the Cathedral Chamber Choir’s services at St. Mary Redcliffe today. Some of the repertoire was very familiar – by Palestrina and Stanford – but we also sang at Mattins the Britten Te Deum in C (which we used to do every term at my Cambridge college) and Walton’s jolly Jubilate.

The new piece was ‘Changed’ by James MacMillan. The only other time I’ve performed any of his music was in the same church a few months ago. As in the third of the Canticos Sagrados there is a long introduction in slow notes (in this case a 3-part canon on a three-note figure which continues throughout the piece) before the choir comes in singing in much shorter note values. Perhaps because of having to think in much shorter rhythmical units, almost like setting a new tempo, this looks easier on the page than it is in practice to perform!

The words of ‘Changed’ are not liturgical or even sacred, though I was told that MacMillan feels they could be given a religious interpretation and hence that his setting is suitable for a church service. I hope to see him in person tomorrow (he is conducting a concert in the Bath Festival) though I won’t get a chance to ask him about this!

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scoring music on a PDA

Posted on May 25, 2005 by vhk10

I recently posted this request to an email list and may as well make it here too. Meanwhile, I think I’ve been invited to sing in two concerts in the first week of July (Chandos Singers/Exultate Singers) but am trying to sort out which I’m doing!

My trusty Psion 3c is giving up the ghost in various ways and is in any case hopelessly dated. I’d like to get a Palm or other kind of PDA to replace it as a personal organiser.

One of the applications I regularly use is called ‘Composer’. It allows you to notate a single line of music on a stave. If the note values add up you can get the Psion to play it back to you, though I can read scores well enough not to need this. But I find it useful for noting down melodies such as new Anglican chants (please don’t laugh). A musical equivalent of the Notepad.

So, my question: are there applications around for PDAs which do this? It would help me to choose between the various models available, or at least ensure that when I do take the plunge I can get the new gadget to do all that the old one did.

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Which Russian composer are you?

Posted on May 18, 2005 by vhk10

For a bit of fun I recommend the Dead Russian Composer Personality Test. I took it and came out as a Stravinsky, while my husband was a Shostakovich, which seemed right somehow. A few friends sat the test, producing more Stravinskies and a Rachmaninov; fortunately none of them was Mussorgsky. I notice that the same site also offers tests to associate you with a stringed instrument or with one of the friends of Elgar commemorated in the Enigma Variations.

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encountering the ringtone

Posted on May 16, 2005 by vhk10

A couple of years ago I finally got a mobile phone, which allowed programmable ringtones of a rather limited kind (monophonic, and with equal note values). I set it up to play the principal tone-row from Lulu, and have used this ever since. As it happens I haven’t heard any music from the opera since then, so I approached last Friday’s performance at the Coliseum with some concern. Would I find myself reaching for my phone all the time? Conversely, if anyone rang me up afterwards, would I interpret the sound as a memory of the opera rattling around in my head and ignore it?
In fact neither of these things happened, and I wasn’t much aware of this form of the row in performance. Either it is for the most part well buried in the score, as often with serial works, or my ear isn’t as good as I thought.

The Guardian‘s reviewer felt that the production had gone off the boil a bit in revival, though I thought it stood up well. This may be because in the meantime I’d been to a rather eccentric production in Wedekind’s home town of Hannover. I’m beginning to get used to Richard Jones’ liking for the 1950s – with in this case some nods to more recent popular culture.

I still feel the translator missed a trick with the name of the company whose shares crash and bankrupt the entire cast in Act 3; this was left as the Jungfrau Railway when it should of course have been ‘Virgin Trains’. Perhaps they feared a writ from Mr. Branson.

It was my first visit to the Coliseum since the building was refurbished. I haven’t been to ENO enough for the changes really to leap out at me, but it looked splendid.

This is my 100th posting to this blog. The Bath Festival starts on Friday and I hope to get to two or three concerts, which I’ll write about.

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