Two events at Bathwick

Posted on September 17, 2004 by vhk10

I’ve recently sung in a couple of performances at St. Mary’s Bathwick (which I’ve been told was visited last year by the Ship of Fools’ Mystery Worshipper).

First up was Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang with orchestra, performed in aid of the organ fund at an all-Mendelssohn concert. I’ve never sung this before, apart from once doing the duet ‘I waited for the Lord’ as a communion anthem. Some of the choral writing was surprisingly hard work, especially in the long chorus ‘The night is departing’, where there were pages on end with only the odd (fast) quaver rest to catch your breath. I think the two soprano soloists get much of the nicest music. The text has a very generic feel to it, although it is biblical. This was partly because we were singing it in the Novello edition’s translation which is adapted to fit the rhythms of Luther’s German as originally set. But I noticed that (apart from some Trinitarian formulae in the doxology of ‘Nun danket’) there is no reference to any New Testament doctrine, or indeed to any biblical event.

I was back a week later to sing in the patronal festival evensong, where I reacquainted myself with ‘Sing we merrily’ by Sidney Campbell.

My next performance is a concert at St. Mary Redcliffe on September 25th (8 p.m.) with the Exultate Singers; Viva! – a programme of music from or about Spain & Latin America.

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what have I learned?

Posted on September 1, 2004 by vhk10

It’s now just over a year since I started this blog, and time maybe to review some aspects of the experience. I intend also to analyse some usage statistics in another posting.

a) I originally expected this to be little more than an annotated version of the list I keep of music I’ve performed. Although I sometimes structure entries that way (e.g. the recent entry about Southwark), the blog has moved in a different direction. It’s also a place to ask questions that have occurred to me, and to relate incidents, not necessarily recent, which have amused, puzzled or saddened me, and maybe to get an alternative account of them.

b) My postings have been mostly concerned with performances I’ve taken part in myself, rather than accounts of those I’ve attended or heard on broadcasts. I will try to keep putting in the latter from time to time. I also have some other ideas which I haven’t tried out yet, such as book reviews or descriptions of buildings where I’ve performed. Even within my own performing life, there are some things that are under-represented, such as the music I work on in singing lessons.

c) It’s often observed that some search engines are biased in favour of blogs in the order in which they present their results. I can confirm this; e.g. a search on ‘Exon Singers’ at the time of writing using one popular search engine puts this site above the Exon Singers’ own official home page! (Apologies to the Exon Singers, as writing this has probably made the problem worse.) I have to assume that what I write is likely to be read by anyone I mention by name, or by someone who runs any organisation I name. This puts constraints on what I can say but also makes me feel that what I write here may make a difference somewhere along the line. Keeping close to home tends to generate the most controversy.

d) At a very early stage spammers started posting pseudo-comments. I used the ‘ban IP’ facility but this was really shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. Being something of a Perl hacker, I have made some small changes to the scripts and templates provided by Moveable Type to filter out unwanted comments; now fewer than 10% of the attempts to post spam succeed. I’m willing to describe these changes in general terms with anyone who also runs a blog using Moveable Type software. (Conditions of use prohibit me from sharing actual code).

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the Virginia Knight B & B choir

Posted on September 1, 2004 by vhk10

The Cathedral Chamber Choir was renamed to something like this on the car parking permits issued to drivers staying at King Alfred’s College during the week at Winchester Cathedral (because I’d made the booking there). I don’t think the name will stick! Another source of confusion was that in addition to our principal conductor Martin Hall, another Martin Hall joined us on some days to sing or play the organ.

The spirit of Wagner wasn’t far from the music at some points, as when we sang the Sanders responses, which use the Dresden Amen, or in the Tristanesque climax to the Nunc of Bairstow in D. It was in fact the first time I’d sung Bairstow in D; I’m not sure how I managed to miss it, since I’d heard other people do it so many times that I knew exactly how it went. Bairstow is not a favourite of mine so it wasn’t on the wishlist, but it’s one more thing to have done.

The first day that I sang was Wednesday, when we performed Howells ‘Westminster’ Canticles, my favourite setting of his after ‘St. Paul’s’, although I appeared to be almost the only one in the choir who’d sung them before. Our anthem was a world premiere of The lilies of his love, a setting of Henry Vaughan commissioned from Ronald Corp by a member of the choir. This proved to be musically interesting without being so difficult that we couldn’t master it in the time available (it’s quite a long anthem), and I found my part singable (notwithstanding a leap of a tenth at one point).

I skipped the Friday (thereby missing And I saw a new heaven, an anthem I don’t care for at all) and returned for the weekend’s services. The highlight of all the pieces I sang was The Angels by Jonathan Harvey, the first time I’d performed a piece by him. We were told this was in the Cathedral Choir’s repertoire (the words are by a former Bishop of Winchester) so this was probably less new to many in the congregation than to us. I was in the first choir, which has a much more mobile part than the second. This is one of those pieces which really makes you aware of the difference between a tone and a semitone, and where I find it essential to stay in tune (we did) because pitch memory can help to find the notes. We rehearsed this during the week rather than just on the day, so that we had time to learn the expression markings thoroughly too.

To leave time for the less familiar works, much of the rest was old faithfuls such as Stanford in C Mag & Nunc and Darke in F Communion settings. I was singing as well as I’ve done at any time this summer, but no solos this time as this choir tends to do verse/solo sections full so the supply is limited!

Next up is a performance on Saturday 4th (at 7.30) of the Lobgesang, as part of an all-Mendelssohn concert in St. Mary’s Bathwick.

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Priory Voices (4): Durham

Posted on September 1, 2004 by vhk10

Firstly, apologies for some downtime over the last few days. The air conditioning in the room in which this server lives is faulty and the server had to be switched off during the Bank Holiday weekend in case it or other computers overheated when there was no one around to notice.

The final outing of the year for Priory Voices was to Durham Cathedral, not one to be missed. I found little had changed since I last came, though the Cathedral has done a major about-turn in the matter of candles in recent years. There are now two large banks of votive lights prominently located on each side of the nave; it’s not very long since the only candles in the building were at the tomb of St. Bede! I appreciated the opportunity for visitors to wander round the building well into the evening; no locking up immediately after Evensong, as happens at some places. It is not a hugely resonant acoustic – I think the heavy columns in the nave soak up a lot of sound – but a strong choir can persuade the echo to come out and play.
There was quite a lot of new music for me this weekend. Most excitingly, it was my first opportunity to sing Purcell’s anthem Jehovah, quam multi sunt hostes mei, which I was smitten by on hearing it for the first time on an evensong broadcast some ten years ago. Ever since then, I’ve longed to sing it, but it’s not often done, perhaps because of the deep bass (written for Gostling?) and tricky tenor solos (don’t know who Purcell’s tricky tenor was). The choral parts are for five voices, giving added richness and the opportunity for some stunning dissonances (e.g. the ‘-gunt’ of ‘insurgunt’ in the second phrase), which some recordings are rather coy about. I regard it as one of the masterpieces of the cathedral repertoire, though the Latin text has led some to conjecture that it was written for Catholic or even secular performance. I don’t get asked to do as much Purcell as I’d like, perhaps because many of his anthems are long and it isn’t easy to get hold of sets of copies.
We also sang Bryan Kelly’s Jamaican Canticles, new to me. I prefer them to the better-known Kelly in C, though I think they lose some of their lightness when re-arranged for SATB from the original treble voices only. (I have an LP of Reading Phoenix Choir singing another choral work by Bryan Kelly, ‘Linda’, which begins ‘Linda went out in her wedges’ and culminates with the moral ‘Promises break like biscuits’. I need hardly add that this was commissioned for the opening of the Reading Hexagon in the 1970’s). Incidentally, I noticed on the back cover of Kelly’s canticles that the publisher also has on its list an arrangement by Stephen Cleobury of the hymn tune ‘MacCabeus’, as if the hero of Handel’s oratorio had hailed from Scotland!
Other than that, there was another chance to sing Vierne’s Messe Solennelle at Romanesque columns as at Gloucester, and another shot at Howells’ ‘Coll. Reg.’ morning canticles, which I felt more secure about this time. We did my favourite Responses, the Lloyd second set, which was a case of coals to Newcastle as they were written for Durham. I enjoyed being able to sing the full complement of psalmody on the Saturday, and I even got some psalm chants which I didn’t know (and which weren’t home-grown), something which rarely happens these days.

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plainsong

Posted on August 17, 2004 by vhk10

I don’t usually choose the places I go on holiday for musical reasons, but when I found out that we were going to spend a fortnight only half an hour’s drive from the monastery of Solesmes in Western France, it became essential to go and hear the singing of plainchant there. I went to two services, a Vespers and a Mass. Both were attended by several dozen lay people and clearly visitors come from far and wide to hear the community perform, though Solesmes doesn’t have the trappings of religious tourism apart from a shop at the monastery gates. The Vespers was lightly accompanied on the organ; the Mass was unaccompanied and for the chanting of the Propers with their more elaborate music a smaller group, rather than the entire community, was used. It isn’t really appropriate to apply ‘reviewing’ criteria to a religious community which isn’t performing for your benefit. I’ll only comment on one stylistic aspect; the marked ‘tailing off’ at the ends of lines which is often copied elsewhere but which doesn’t always travel well to drier acoustics.

I have been exposed to a lot of plainchant over the years. This becomes obvious when I have to sing a plainsong hymn in a Cathedral or perform a work which uses plainsong in some way; I can usually sing the melody straight off while others struggle. And being able to identify the eight psalm tones is a party piece of sorts. But it was clear from inspecting the publications in the bookshop at Solesmes, as from earlier experiences such as a workshop with Mary Berry in Oxford, that there are whole dimensions to Gregorian chant that I’m ignorant of, as I’ve never really got into the neumes business.

Ultimately I have to admit that I miss harmony when singing with or listening to a choir doing plainchant, or anything else in unison for a long time. This also applies to unison hymns (which is why I haven’t enjoyed the last couple of weddings where I’ve been in the choir!).

Other musical points of interest in the holiday included the five pianos on view in the château at Le Lude and the extravagant piece of French organ music we heard someone practising in Angers Cathedral. We were able to listen to concerts on France-Musique though the area we were staying in wasn’t covered by digital broadcasting.

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flat peaches in Southwark

Posted on July 26, 2004 by vhk10

That’s ‘peaches’, not ‘pitches’! I bought some at Borough Market, an added bonus to visiting Southwark Cathedral on a Saturday, as part of a weekend there with the Erleigh Cantors. As on previous visits, we were well looked after, with for example a copy of the current music list for every singer and the use of a kitchen for making hot drinks or squash (the only other Cathedral I’ve known to provide this was Christ Church, Dublin).
We sang a lot of music this weekend and an annotated list follows:

Saturday Evensong:
Neary, Martin Responses
Harris, William Behold the tabernacle of God
This was written when the RSCM moved into Addington Palace. Did they commission another anthem when they moved out a few years ago?
Swayne, Giles Magnificat
I wrote earlier about starting to learn this with the rhythm, contrary to my usual practice. Then come the notes and the underlay (not trivial, since there are occasional syllables or pairs of syllables which are unexpectedly repeated). After all this is sorted out, technical problems such as the 3 top B’s the sopranos get towards the end of the piece are just a courtesy detail. I found I was too busy with the earlier sections to be bothered about these, and so they weren’t a problem. Clergy and visitors to the Cathedral alike were intrigued by this setting.
Fayrfax, Robert Evening Canticles ‘faux-bourdon’ (Nunc)
Rutter, John Praise ye the Lord
After some deliberation and experiment we decided to shout the ‘Praise!’ at the end.

Sunday Eucharist
Piccolo, Anthony Canterbury Mass
This is the most interesting setting using modern texts that I’ve sung. Also notable for the flying start you have to make in the Gloria.
Gabrieli, Giovanni Jubilate Deo
A real test of concentration, this one, as it goes on quite a bit longer than you expect.
Gesualdo, Carlo O vos omnes
I didn’t expect anything to upstage the Swayne for me, but this did; it’s the first piece by Gesualdo that I’ve sung. Even to someone accustomed to 20th century music it was startling, not so much for dissonance (nothing that can’t be equalled in this respect by many passages of Purcell, for example), but for its harmonic progessions.

Sunday Evensong:
Batten, Adrian O praise the Lord
Stanford, Charles V Evening Canticles in A
My favourite Stanford setting! It’s just a bit grander than the others, presumably because it can also be performed with an orchestra.
Harwood, Basil O how glorious
Hadn’t done this for ages and I realised that I’d learnt some wrong notes in the past – three places where the sopranos drop a fifth and cross the alto line in the process.

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Priory Voices (3): Gloucester

Posted on July 18, 2004 by vhk10

I fulfilled two ambitions by singing at Gloucester this last weekend with Priory Voices. Firstly, I had never before sung at Gloucester Cathedral. Now I’ve done this, there are only five C of E Cathedrals in England I have yet to perform in: Sheffield (scheduled for October), Birmingham, Leicester, Wakefield and Bradford. Therefore I’ve now sung in all the Cathedrals in the South of England and all the ‘ancient’ ones (those that were Cathedrals before the nineteenth century, half of the total). There’s no particular reason why I should have waited so long for Gloucester, except that the city centre is relatively barren compared with many other cathedral cities, which may make it less appealing to choirs. The cathedral though is one of the very finest. We made good use of the recently refurbished organ, which sounded especially impressive after we’d been rehearsing with an upright piano in the education centre!

Furthermore, I got to sing Howells’ St. Paul’s Service for the first time since I left Cambridge a decade ago. I think this is my favourite Howells setting, and that its long, sweeping vocal lines are more suited to women’s voices than, say, the fussier openings of Coll. Reg. or Gloucester, which I’ve sung many times in the last few years. But this view wasn’t universal among the members of Priory Voices! Anyway, that is another item on my wishlist seen to.

I can’t finish without mentioning the Vierne Messe Solennelle which we sang at the Eucharist. I sang this last year in Bristol Cathedral; we purchased our own copies then and rather than take out a second mortgage and buy a full score I got the vocal score, which is about the size of a postage stamp and doesn’t have the organ part in. (If you’re lucky, you are given a few organ notes to give you your lead, otherwise you just have to count bars and pitch your note from memory). There’s something of the fairground organ about this setting (e.g. the gloriously naff little motif which accompanies Sanctus and Hosannas). As for the choir, I think Vierne thought of it as an additional organ stop – a real Vox Humana if you like. And frequently his idea of developing musical material is to repeat it at a different pitch. But it’s fun to sing in the right building.

Next time, I’ll be posting a report on my weekend singing Swayne et al. in Southwark Cathedral.

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the worst week of the year

Posted on July 11, 2004 by vhk10

… for concert-going in London, except possibly the week between Christmas and New Year. I am attending a meeting at the British Library tomorrow and my usual practice if work takes me to London is to end the day by going to a concert, but I have drawn a blank this time. The major orchestras and ENO have finished their seasons, the Proms haven’t started yet and the Wigmore Hall is dark because it’s being refurbished. I’ve tried a few other likely venues such as St. John’s Smith Square but no joy. All I can find is a sold-out Tosca at the Royal Opera House (everyone who’s missed this production over the last 40 years wants to see it!) and two concerts on the South Bank: one by a local youth orchestra, and the other a 70th birthday concert of works by a composer unknown to me. So it looks like I’ll go to the theatre instead.

On a more positive note, the Chantry Singers concert of Kodály, Haydn, Schütz and Walliser (a composer previously unknown to me) was well received. I didn’t feel I was singing quite at my best. I think the reason was probably the need to adjust to the high pitch of the organ, after rehearsing with a piano at standard pitch. (Salisbury Cathedral presents a similar problem). I’d got used to singing the music at that pitch and was consciously thinking higher, not because I have perfect pitch but because I had a physical memory of what it felt like singing them. But pushing up notes from below, especially very high ones, is a bad idea! I still haven’t worked out which of the tenors or basses caught my husband out in a recent cricket match.
Next week I’ll be writing up a weekend of services in Gloucester Cathedral.

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why are you clapping?

Posted on July 6, 2004 by vhk10

…. asked my two-year-old son, finding me with a copy of the Swayne Magnificat on my knee which I was beginning to learn, for a performance with the Erleigh Cantors at Southwark Cathedral at the end of the month.
The cross-rhythms require a great deal of concentration and as always familiarity, possibly to the point of memorisation, will make it all easier. There are several ways of making sense of them, the most basic being as a kind of binary on-off sequence, though this doesn’t give you any sense of structure. To start with I’m looking at it bar by bar (most of the piece is in a strict 4/4). Often it’s clear how there are smaller, repeating rhythmic cells, though when they turn out to be 3 ½ or 1 ½ beats long it may not be a huge amount of help knowing they are there! At the moment I’m concentrating on one passage of about six bars where the rhythm is especially irregular.

There are several other new (to me) pieces in this weekend: O Praise the Lord by Rutter, Piccolo’s Canterbury Mass, O vos omnes by Gesualdo and Jubilate Deo by Gabrieli. The last two from the OUP European Sacred Music volume which I’m increasingly asked to sing from and which has brought a lot of things into the repertoire.

Meanwhile I have the music for the Priory Voices visit to Gloucester Cathedral and a new CD player to play the accompanying CD on, and the Chantry Singers’ concert of church music is this coming weekend.

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more on Mags and Nuncs

Posted on June 25, 2004 by vhk10

A quick calculation shows that the 21-CD Priory Records Mag and Nunc set (see my previous posting) contains some 188 different settings of the canticles (including a few instances of free-standing Mags or Nuncs). A few settings appear more than once, such as Dyson in D. About a third of these 188 I would be unlikely ever to sing, because they are only in local use, and/or for men’s voices only or for trebles only (in practice I’m never asked to sing canticles of this last type). I estimate that I’ve sung a little over half of the rest at one time or another. Many of them I learnt with the choir of my Cambridge college, which performed about thirty different settings a year.

188 different settings – but which ones aren’t there? I found one very striking omission: William Mathias’ ‘Jesus College’ canticles, which I think of as a standard part of the repertoire; at any rate I can recall the music instantly to mind. I found that early settings were rather under-represented (for example Caustun, Humphrey, and a couple I’ve done by Tomkins). Perhaps when the recordings were made there weren’t good editions, or they were inconveniently long. The same two reasons may account for the absence of Stanford’s Magnificat in B flat for double choir, which has enjoyed a recent surge in popularity thanks to a new edition (I will leave to another time my views on on whether this is deserved or not!).

Some of the missing ones are missing for good reason! I can’t remember anything about Arnold in A, Nicholson in D flat or Macpherson in D, for example. There was a time when these and their like formed a large proportion of the settings I sang – a pity when there were good settings around which were no harder.

On the other hand, listening to these CDs has reminded me of many settings I ought to add to my wishlist: among them Ayleward, Howells in B minor, Purcell in B flat, Tippett St. John’s, Parry in D. Now that the music list for my forthcoming trip to Winchester has been announced I see that I get a chance to sing Bairstow in D for the first time.

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an embarrassing mistake

Posted on June 21, 2004 by vhk10

Singing the Kodály Missa Brevis again reminds me of what happened on the only other occasion I performed this piece. Kodály is admirably uninhibited about using the top end of the sopranos’ range and the score is sprinkled with top A’s and above. I had recently joined the Cambridge Chamber Group and we did the Mass on little rehearsal, I think because most people had recently sung it in a concert. At any rate I knew the work less well than everyone else and in those days I was not so conscientious about learning notes. On one of the most exposed high bits I found myself a semitone out from the others. I still shudder inwardly at the recollection of this, but it’s taken until now for me to have an opportunity to perform the passage correctly!
In an odd sort of way the Missa Brevis reminds me in parts of Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G minor. For example, the setting of the words ‘Glorificamus te’ in the Gloria. Perhaps it’s what comes of noodling around with folk-song.

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Britten at the Theatre Royal

Posted on June 11, 2004 by vhk10

I went to one other performance at the Bath Festival: Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream put on by English Touring Opera at the Theatre Royal. This production was well reviewed and I generally enjoyed it, although the Oberon and some other singers didn’t always come over very strongly. But I realise that somewhere along the line I don’t completely connect with Britten. In particular, I find his sense of humour rather heavy-handed, although I did have fun with the take-offs of other operas in the play-within-a-play in the final act. I wouldn’t let this put me off going to a performance of one of his operas another time (this was the first one I’d ever seen).

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