Psalms at York

Posted on September 9, 2005 by vhk10

York Minster must – in the words of our conductor – have known that I was coming with Priory Voices, as they laid on lots of psalms. In addition to the full whack for the 27th evening, we got all of Ps.107 (the first time I think I’ve sung this psalm in its entirety). We were also invited to do what the Minster’s own choir does at the end of the Eucharist: sing Ps. 150 in procession.

An occupational hazard of singing at York: Bairstow. We sang his setting for Ps. 107 and also Blessed City, heavenly Salem, which I have only sung twice before. What stuck in my memory about previous performances is the difficulty of the entry at ‘Many a blow and biting sculpture’. This is on an upbeat during an accelerando and I once sang in a performance where the entire choir (which included much better musicians than me) unanimously failed to come in at that point. (That didn’t happen this time).

The rest of the music was familiar from earlier weekends with this choir: Vierne’s Messe Solennelle, Howells’ Gloucester Service and so on, the only other novelty being Byrd’s Miserere Mei in a high key which put me onto a different line from usual.

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Caer

Posted on September 2, 2005 by vhk10

I sang a couple of days of the Cathedral Chamber Choir’s week at Chester Cathedral. We began with a Tudor evensong – Tomkins Second Service and Byrd’s Teach me, O Lord, in the latter of which I did the verse part (the first solos since Magnus was born).
The following day was a programme very much to my taste, of Purcell’s G minor canticles (and they really were in G minor this time) and his anthem O sing unto the Lord. I’d done this once before, with the Cambridge University Bach Society. The apparatus criticus to the score of this work proved an unexpected source of entertainment, since it records the editor’s mounting annoyance that he had been denied access to a manuscript which was once available.

An account of a weekend at York Minster with Priory Voices will follow soon.

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back in the choir stalls …

Posted on August 19, 2005 by vhk10

This is really just a holding message. Over the next 10 days or so I’ll be singing in Chester Cathedral and York Minster. I’ll report back afterwards!
Then in September I’ll have to chase up various places on behalf of the Cathedral Chamber Choir. Will we be able to get a weekend some time in Chichester? Is our booking of Norwich in August 2007 confirmed? Will Durham Cathedral be more responsive to a letter than to emails?

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Proms 30 and 33

Posted on August 6, 2005 by vhk10

On Thursday my husband and daughter went to Prom 30 (Gothenburg SO, Dudamel, Von Otter). This was my daughter’s first so she probably now thinks that they all begin with an hour of sorting out feedback noise. It was worth it when the concert (of Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Sibelius) got going, though the delay and the change of conductor were probably the cause of a certain amount of scrappiness.

On Sunday night it was my turn, to hear Runnicles and the BBCSO in the first prom to feature music by Berg, who is being celebrated this year as an ‘anniversary composer’. Welcome as this is, I can’t help feeling that this particular anniversary is a little spurious. Shouldn’t one commemorate the 125th birthday rather than the 120th? And is it just coincidence that Berg’s music comes out of copyright next year? It would have been lovely to have a chance to hear some of the less frequently performed works, such as the Altenberglieder or the Chamber Concerto, but in their absence I settled for the Three Orchestral Pieces. I felt this performance didn’t quite take off until the third piece; nevertheless it surpassed listening to a recording (I’d never heard the work live before), since no recording can do justice to the dialogues which take place between the various parts of the orchestra. There was also some visual excitement in the use of a hammer in the third piece. I’d always imagined this has being operated like a gong, but the hammer (which looked like an enormous croquet mallet) was swung down over the percussionist’s head onto a large block of wood. (It is therefore hard to be taken by surprise by a hammer blow if you are in the audience!)

After the interval there was Mahler’s Das klagende Lied which was new to me. It was performed with the first part, which Mahler later cut; having heard it I think Mahler was right to cut it as it was pretty turgid compared with the rest. This piece was suited to the venue, though, with the offstage orchestra in the third section working particularly well.

The Guardian reviewed the concert here.

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Descants

Posted on August 5, 2005 by vhk10

Despite being a soprano, I’m not totally in favour of these. The best ones complement the melody they sit on top of, and are interesting and melodic in themselves. But if you are unlucky they are made up by stringing notes from the harmony together and you get something which would be awkward to sing at any pitch and which confines itself to the same high register without any break. Either that, or from the listener’s perspective the descant does nothing for the tune it is supposed to enhance apart from obscuring it. There has been more than one of this latter type on evensong broadcasts this year. Fortunately most of the home-grown ones I get to sing are well written. Now, why do so many of them have a flattened seventh towards the end?

It was good to meet Don Temples (an occasional poster here) when he came to sing at Bristol Cathedral. I didn’t hear all of the service I went to (unaware of the Harbour Festival, I made the error of trying to drive over for Sunday evensong) but they sounded good in the anthem I heard.

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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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