an unprepared dissonance

Posted on January 28, 2005 by vhk10

Last weekend I was performing on my home territory with Bath Baroque. The first half of the programme was all-Handel, with a new piece to me, the Birthday Ode for Queen Anne, which was very enjoyable as long as you didn’t pay too much attention to the words! We also sang the Hallelujah Chorus.

The major part of the second half was the Missa Scala Aretina by Francisco Valls, sometime organist of Barcelona Cathedral, new to all of us. For this we were divided into three four-part choirs, which averaged out at about two to a part. My yardstick for Baroque masses is not the Mass in B minor (that would be unfair!) but something like Cavalli’s Messa Concertata, a work which has featured in some of the most boring evenings of my singing and concert-going life. The Missa Scala Aretina was certainly an improvement on that, with some lively rhythms and melodies (though I’m not sure that the ‘Crucifixus’ was quite the place for one of the bouncier examples of this). Furthermore, the small numbers gave plenty of responsibility to individual singers, and we didn’t use soloists so I wasn’t stuck too much of the time on an A – or rather G since baroque pitch here meant down a tone. Valls had a great liking for the so-called English cadence, and according to the programme note got into trouble for using an unprepared dissonance in the Gloria, though the passage in question seems pretty tame now. The concert ended with a couple of South American carols we’d done in earlier programmes.

The weather probably put a dent in our audience and it was further diminished when some left during a heavy snow shower in the interval, presumably fearing that their journey home was at risk. Among those who stayed, however, was a reviewer from the Bath Chronicle, and the text of a favourable review has been put on the Exultate Singers’ website.

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an 18th century poster

Posted on January 19, 2005 by vhk10

Bath Baroque advertises its concerts with posters in a pastiche 18th century style and I shall be singing in their next concert on Saturday, currently promoted here. The billing for the Mexican carols is particularly entertaining.

Meanwhile, our conductor’s daughter was christened on Sunday and we performed much of Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, some in the original SSA version, some in the SATB arrangement. I have been familiar with the first half of this for a long time, since it was an O-level set work for me. The only previous time I performed it I sang 1st soprano and this must have imprinted strongly on my memory, as adjusting to singing 2nd in the closely written canons in a couple of the the carols proved quite tricky.

We won a bottle of champagne in a Christmas quiz set by the Bristol Bach Choir. I was about to say that I’d no connexion with this choir, but I sang alongside them in the Brahms Requiem in which they joined forces with the Chantry Singers. I was also once on their waiting list for auditions for a year or so with no result! The quiz was largely general knowledge/crossword-type clues but there was a musical theme to much of it.

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what I gave/got for Christmas

Posted on January 10, 2005 by vhk10

Various CDs got distributed at Christmas time. I received a set of the Beaux Arts trio playing Beethoven’s piano trios which I’m gradually working my way through. As well as the canonical works it contains some rarities such as the arrangement for this medium of the Second Symphony. It doesn’t seem to be known whether Beethoven did this arrangement himself, though the rather uninspired piano writing suggests to me that it was someone else.

I gave the children a CD of John Rutter’s ‘Three Musical Fables’. The Reluctant Dragon, in particular, was a favourite of my younger days; by which I don’t mean when I was the age my children are now, but when I was a student. Some of us got hold of a score and used to sing along with the recording; we particularly enjoyed the banquet fugue and the triple parody at one point of Britten’s music/Auden’s poetry/Peter Pears’ singing!

My daughter also got a small battery-driven keyboard, which I have to confess was a freebie that I passed on to her. It is in various ways rather annoying; it has an option to play a pre-programmed snatch of Für Elise, though not at a pitch which could be reproduced by pressing the keys, and is not properly in tune with itself. Moreover she had better not learn pitch from it as it is about a third out. Perhaps I should replace it soon with a more accurate one.

The need to book a cathedral week in the summer of 2007 for the Cathedral Chamber Choir is looming greater. I had one Cathedral which looked likely, but communication with them seems to have run into the ground. Some months ago I tried writing to Durham, but switched to email when I printed out the letter with a new cartridge in the printer and it came out in an appropriately Palatinate shade of mauve. However, the email never produced any response. Probably time to get on to some alternatives.

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2004’s and 2005’s resolutions

Posted on December 31, 2004 by vhk10

Time to revisit my musical resolutions for 2004 and see how I did.
a) singing items on the wishlist. Priory Voices provided two of these: Purcell’s Jehovah, quam multi and Howells’ St. Paul’s Service. In addition there were other things I sang for the first time, such as the Swayne Magnificat and music by James MacMillan, which had been significant gaps in what I’d done.
b) Bath Festival Chorus. Total failure here as this choir hasn’t performed since summer 2003 so there was no opportunity to sing in it.
c) Cathedrals. I sang in Gloucester and Sheffield as planned; in each case I could see, for very different reasons, why I hadn’t sung there before. I also performed in Westminster Cathedral for the first time.
d) Auditions. I heard nothing from the Paragon Singers (I wasn’t really expecting to!) but did audition for the Exultate Singers and have performed with them so this one worked out.
The main solo I did was in Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb; as it happened there were few available in the Cathedral visits I made this year. I found that with one choir I needed actively to volunteer myself as a potential soloist; I had been too modest to do this before, thinking rather that it might disqualify me!

For 2005: opportunities to sing more items from the wishlist or in of the four remaining Cathedrals (Birmingham, Wakefield, Bradford and Leicester) would be welcome. Nothing planned as yet but you never know what will come up during the year. I ought to add a resolution which depends on me rather than on others: to abolish the ‘all-purpose low note’ of rather indeterminate pitch which I sometimes use below about the F above middle C. This is just due to laziness so I ought to banish it for good.

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Two Christmas events

Posted on December 24, 2004 by vhk10

Firstly the Messiah in the exotically-dedicated St. Cyriac’s Church, Lacock. I was about due a chance to perform this as I think the last time I sang it was in 2000. The forces could hardly have been more different from the only previous time I sang with the Bath Philharmonia, the Mahler 8 in the 2000 Bath Festival. The performance was only slightly cut; so we sang But thanks be to God, but not for example Lift up your heads.

Finally before Christmas came the Exultate Singers’ Christmas concert in St. James Priory church in Bristol. As there were lots of items on the programme I can only single out a few. The year ended for me as it began, with Morton Lauridsen’s O magnum mysterium. Before this year I had not come across Holst’s Ave Maria, probably because it’s for eight female voices. There were some arrangements new to me, such as Bob Chilcott’s swinging Away in a manger and Andrew Carter’s I wander as I wander, as well as another outing for some Advent music from the Radio 4 broadcast and the carol in Spanish from the Viva! concert; this last, together with another Spanish carol, formed the finale, accompanied by a guitar/percussion duo.

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Gaude-tee Sunday

Posted on December 15, 2004 by vhk10

Sunday took me to a new singing venue: Wentworth Golf Club, where some of us sang carols to members and their guests before and during their Christmas lunch. Afterwards we were catered for in a small function room. It’s occasions like this where you realise that the arrangments of We wish you a merry Christmas and In Dulci Jubilo in Carols for Choirs are a good deal more complicated than the opening bars lead you to expect!

Two other events are rapidly coming up: firstly a performance of the Messiah on December 16th in St. Cyriac’s Church, Lacock with members of the Bath Philharmonia. This is part of a ten-concert tour of the work which has a rather complicated history. Various local choirs including the Chantry Singers were invited to step in and the Exultate Singers have taken on this performance.

Then it’s the Christmas candlelight concert on December 20th in St. James Priory church where we’ll be doing among other things some of the music from the broadcast. I had thought of Praetorius until now as rather a soft option as a composer, but I’ve had to revise that opinion! Perhaps before I was just doing some of his easier pieces.

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Ariadne in Advent

Posted on December 10, 2004 by vhk10

I felt it was about time to go to the opera again, and although the piece isn’t a favourite of mine I went to WNO’s Ariadne auf Naxos at the Bristol Hippodrome, that being what I could get to easily. Another opera with a contorted plot to go with the Trovatore I saw there last time.

I’d heard this opera on the radio and never been able to follow what was going on in the Prologue. When it’s seen on stage it becomes more comprehensible as it’s possible to disentangle the two unrelated groups of people sharing the same space. As for the ‘opera’ in the second act, to start with I have to back Zerbinetta against the Composer; I’d find it pretty tedious without her intervention, at least until Bacchus appears. We were especially impressed with Bacchus (Peter Hoare); overall, I felt I was slightly unlucky with the night I went to (some performers are only doing some of the performances in the run). The Guardian’s review, with which I’m not going to argue, is here.

Meanwhile Advent began with a big service in Bathwick. This included Naylor’s Vox dicentis. I have only performed this once before, in a concert in Canterbury on tour with the choir of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge; it’s long, and I don’t usually make Cathedral visits in Advent so I’ve not had an opportunity since. It’s a preposterous piece really, but ubiquitous at this time of year; I’ve heard it on Radio 3 twice since I sang it (the second performance, on an evensong broadcast, is still available online at the time of writing). Another ubiquitous piece we sang was Bruckner’s Virga Jesse, which I’m doing again elsewhere in a week, and have heard in person at Bath Abbey and on a broadcast on Radio 3. There seems to be general disagreement about whether it should be conducted in 2 or in 4. I haven’t sung it for a very long time, but I attribute its reappearance in multiple places to European Sacred Music rather than morphic resonance.
Our Bathwick Advent service also included two pieces totally new to me: Händl’s Ecce concipies and Javi Busto’s Ave Maria. Busto is a Basque composer whose music seems to be practially unknown in the English-speaking world, to judge by an internet search I did on him.

Things are happening thick and fast. Next up for me is an Advent broadcast of the Morning Service with the Exultate Singers in Berkeley Castle which will go out on Sunday December 12th at 8.10 on Radio 4. Music mostly by Praetorius, with brass ensemble. [2006 – as this is some time ago I can reveal that this broadcast was actually recorded a few days beforehand and broadcast as if live. The Sunday morning service on Radio 4 is now so early that it is hard to assemble performers and set things up otherwise.]

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places where I’ve sung: Merton College chapel

Posted on November 30, 2004 by vhk10

A recent visit for a retirement dinner and some interest from a visitor to this site prompts me to write about my time at Merton College, Oxford, and in particular about the Chapel Choir there (I was also involved in running the Music Society and the Kodály Choir).

Merton Chapel has a resonant acoustic and this, combined with its distance from any main roads, makes it a popular venue for recordings. I was recently given a lovely recording of the Tallis Scholars’ anniversary concert there, for example. Sometimes I believe I’ve been able to identify the building on a recording without knowing that it was made there.

The main organ is at the west end and was once memorably likened to a vanity unit (by John Mark Ainsley in his lay clerk days). It was paid for by a donation, under rather complicated conditions. One of these was that a trompe l’œil painting should be displayed around and underneath the instrument, depicting the nave that was originally planned but never built, with famous old Mertonians standing in it. I never saw this painting because as soon as the terms of the gift permitted it was taken down, given to another church and never heard of again. (It’s difficult to see what the new owners could have done with something so specific to a different place). Although this was nearly a quarter of a century ago, I’m still asked whether the painting is in the Chapel; it’s going to take a long time for the College to live it down! People who saw it tell me that it was of dubious artistic merit and made the west end of the Chapel very dark.

We also had a chamber organ which was fine for accompanying small-scale pieces, provided you kept off the Cremona stop.

We sang evensong each week in term apart from one week when there was a Communion service, and one midweek service a term on a feast day. We were paid £1.25 and a meal for each service. Because of the distance between the stalls and the main organ, most of our repertoire was unaccompanied. People used to a chapel choir system such as that in many Cambridge colleges may be suprised to know that we only sang a full Canticle setting once a year – the rest of the time it was faux-bourdons or Anglican chant. On the subject of Anglican chants, the choir library may still contain one that I wrote; lots of my friends were writing them and I didn’t want to be left out!
The choir went mixed before the College did – indeed its high point was probably during that time, when Andrew Parrott was organ scholar and Emma Kirkby sang in it. My knowledge of it in recent times derives mostly from Matthew O’Donovan, who was organ scholar till 2003. News of the music society and chapel choir has only been sporadically reported in the College magazine, though in the last couple of years the new Chaplain has been putting some news of the Chapel choir in the Chapel reports. I get the impression that not a huge amount has changed since my time. Perhaps it should have done, since Oxford Colleges with mixed-voice choirs have in general been have been trying to raise their choirs’ profiles in the last few years, though there is still a huge amount of ground to make up on their Cambridge equivalents. I’ll write about that some other time.

[January 2007: I comment on the proposals to start a choral foundation at Merton]

Music at Merton page

Merton Chapel Choir site

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Four hands (Mozartfest 2)

Posted on November 23, 2004 by vhk10

On Sunday night I attended the final concert of the Mozartfest, Peter Donohoe and Martin Roscoe playing piano duets. When I learnt the piano at school I played my way through some of this repertoire with my teacher, including such works as Mozart’s sonata for two pianos (thereby enhancing my mental capacity, it seems) and Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor (a piece which contains one of the least subtle modulations I’ve ever come across). But I don’t think I’ve ever been to a whole concert for these forces before.
Much of the music in this concert was known to me in other arrangements. In the case of Mozart’s Fantasia K608 I found myself missing the variety of tone of the organ (in fact Dame Gillian Weir played it in Bath Abbey earlier in the week). The first half concluded with one of the standards: Brahms’ Variations on the St. Antony Chorale.

The highlight for me came after the interval with the second and third of Debussy’s Nocturnes in a masterly arrangement by Ravel. I didn’t expect to miss the orchestral colour as little as I did. Ravel exploited the distance between the two instruments to suggest a larger group of performers; this sometimes resulted in some cruelly exposed simultaneoous double-octave writing for the two players. I was particularly impressed with their controlled changes of dynamic level. The advertised programme ended with Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. I have to admit that apart from the Vespers Rachmaninov’s music doesn’t do very much for me, though I find myself attending performances of it quite often. I didn’t know these pieces (often not very dance-like) at all, so I had no orchestral arrangement intruding this time. For an encore we had two of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances. The concert was recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

A note on the venue: many of the people attending these concerts are old and/or infirm, but the first thing they have to do on arrival is grapple with the heavy swinging doors of the Assembly Rooms. Why, especially in these days of easy access, can’t one door at least be fixed open 20 minutes or so before each concert, as happens at (say) the Wigmore Hall, or almost every other concert venue I’ve ever been to?

Rachmaninov (represented this time by a movement from the Vespers) is a tenuous link to Saturday night when we battled through atrocious weather conditions and (in my case) a cold to sing a concert at Dulverton with the Exultate Singers. All the pieces, except some spirituals and folksong arrangements, were known to me though in some cases I hadn’t done them for some time and of course I hadn’t necessarily done them with this choir before.

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Mozartfest 2004 (1)

Posted on November 15, 2004 by vhk10

The annual Mozartfest in Bath is nearly halfway through, and we are going to as much of it as is practical. We each went to one concert given by the Vienna String Sextet, and agreed that in general they give beauty of sound priority over dramatic effect, although I found at times that the tone of one of the violas differed from that of the other players. (My comments may be biased though by my location towards the left-hand end of one of the front rows).

The concert I attended, on Saturday morning, began with Mozart’s string quintet K.515, which was followed by an arrangement by one of the sextet of Beethoven’s piano sonata Op. 101. Much of this lent itself happily to this new scoring, particularly in the fugal passages, but I did miss the percussive effects the piano can achieve and at times it seemed rather bottom-heavy (perhaps due again to my location).

In fact the Vienna String Sextet have a line in rescoring works for their forces, and not long ago on Radio 3 I heard them play an arrangement of Berg’s piano sonata, which inevitably came out sounding in parts like some of Verklärte Nacht that got away. This time they were performing Verklärte Nacht itself. I know I wasn’t the only person who came to the concert because of this, and to judge by the audience reaction it was the highlight of the morning for a number of others. It confirmed my preference for the original string sextet version over the arrangement for string orchestra; I feel it has greater intensity. (Tomorrow Radio 3 is broadcasting another performance the sextet gave of it last night in London, together with some Brahms). After that, we didn’t have an encore, but Friday night’s audience were treated to Roses from the South. I’m sorry that it’s the sextet’s last season – I suppose I shan’t hear them again. The Guardian’s review of the concert can be found here.

People were still talking about the Schoenberg when I returned to the Assembly Rooms last night to hear Wolfgang Holzmair and Imogen Cooper perform Mozart, Haydn and Wolf, including a few songs in my own repertoire. This recital definitely took off in the second half. In the first half, Holzmair contended in the Haydn with English texts and some ornamentation that took him out of his usual range. And the combined talents of Mozart, Holzmair and Cooper could not override the fact that the text of the cantata K471 is essentially the Masons patting themselves on the back because one of their number had been honoured by the emperor for services to metallurgy!

The second half was a selection of Wolf’s Mörike settings, which showed Holzmair at his best and gave Imogen Cooper a chance to shine too. They included a number of Wolf’s most famous settings, but this didn’t pull in a large audience. Perhaps Wolf still isn’t that well known to the concert-going public, despite the anniversary last year. Or maybe we were just spoilt for choice this week.

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a holding message

Posted on November 12, 2004 by vhk10

Not much time to write an entry this week except to mention a couple of recent events and some things coming up.
On All Souls’ Day I sang in a liturgical performance of Fauré’s Requiem. I used to prefer Duruflé’s setting, but I’m coming round to this piece now. I’m not sure to what this extent this is because I’m appreciating Fauré more than I once did, or because I have gone off the Duruflé a bit. After singing the Dies Iræ to plainchant I got another helping of it when I returned home to find the Symphonie Fantastique on the radio.
Last weekend I sang at the licensing of the new Bath University Chaplain, when we performed Parry’s I was Glad. We were joined for this by the University Chamber Choir, who also sang a piece by their conductor.

This coming week sees Bath’s annual Mozartfest, which has a particularly interesting programme this year; we are going to half-a-dozen concerts between us. At the end of the week I’m performing with the Exultate Singers in Dulverton (I reckon Bath to Dulverton must be one of the longest journeys you can make in England while still remaining in the same county!).

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some panoramic views

Posted on November 3, 2004 by vhk10

I spent last weekend singing with the Cathedral Chamber Choir in High Bradfield Parish Church and Sheffield Cathedral. (Don’t follow these links if your connexion is slow). High Bradfield was arranged for us by the Sheffield people because the Cathedral turned out to be unavailable on the Saturday. We sang evensong to members of the Prayer Book Society, including a new piece for me, Arvo Pärt’s Littlemore Tractus, which one of our number had sung on an Evensong broadcast not long ago. It’s some years since I sang any Pärt and his Magnificat is on my wishlist. This particular piece had a noticeable mediæval influence in its organ part.

On Sunday we sang in the Cathedral itself and there was another new piece for me in the morning service: Palestrina’s Missa Dies Sanctificatus. I prefer Victoria’s music to Palestrina’s (which I find rather bland), and to judge by what I’m asked to sing the people I sing for feel the same way, as it’s a while since I’ve sung one of his Mass settings. I got back into the style easily enough, though I had consciously not to force the music into the four-beat bars the edition had imposed on it, in order to feel comfortable with the rhythms. The service ended with a short ceremony in one of the Cathedral’s car parks, before it becomes the site for a new Cathedral visitors’ centre. I’m not sure what would be appropriate music for this, but what we sang was Bruckner’s Locus iste. Sheffield Cathedral is a pleasant building to sing in, though its pipe organ has been out of action since 1998.

Until Tuesday I had intended to sing Sunday evensong as well. This would have involved leaving the service slightly early in order to catch the last possible cross-country train (going via London was impossible because there were no through trains from Sheffield to London and more engineering work near Bath). But then even that train was replaced by a bus south of Birmingham and it was impossible to get from Sheffield to anywhere near Bath at a sensible time. As others were similarly hampered by the lack of trains it was a reduced choir that sang the evensong.

Now that I have sung in Sheffield there are only four C of E Cathedrals in England I have yet to perform in: Bradford, Birmingham, Leicester and Wakefield. I have no definite plans at the moment for any of these.

Sent to me from a review of a choral concert in the Ely Standard: ‘Finzi’s God is Gone upended the concert’. An anthem for Nietzsche, perhaps?

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