Priory Voices (2): Wells

Posted on June 7, 2004 by vhk10

So at last I’ve sung a service in Wells Cathedral. I was a bit disappointed not to do all of the promised three psalms, but there was some compensation in the form of a lovely introit, new to me: Domenico Scarlatti’s Iste Confessor. A simple strophic setting of the hymn, built around a beautiful melody given in alternate verses to soprano soloist and to choir. We sang from an internet edition downloaded from this page. All the rest was very familiar music: Stanford in G, Rose responses and Weelkes’ Alleluia, I heard a voice, the last also from an internet edition (I’m coming across them more and more often these days).

I was asked by a member of the congregation one of the things I’m frequently asked ‘Where are you from?’ I find cathedral congregations, and even sometimes even the clergy, often have difficulty imagining how we can come from all over the place and put together performances on the day, without meeting beforehand. Surely it’s not that uncommon a skill? I’ll be doing it again next month when Priory Voices visit Gloucester.

Meanwhile, a couple of choirs have passed on an invitation to me and other members to participate in the TV Wife Swap; apparently they’re targeting choral singers for the next series!

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Priory Voices (1): Lincoln

Posted on June 2, 2004 by vhk10

I haven’t written about Priory Voices before, but they are going to feature a lot this summer. The choir meets several times a year for a weekend singing in a Cathedral; its members come from all over (though many live or have lived in the North-West) and we rehearse intensively at the place where we’re singing. This works because the conductor chooses singers who can turn out a good performance under this sort of pressure, most of whom will know most of the music already. The music is sent out in advance with a recording so you can mug up on anything unfamiliar.

Unfortunately, my music for last weekend’s visit to Lincoln Cathedral was delayed in the post and only arrived at the last possible minute. In my experience (it was my third visit to sing services there) rehearsal time at this cathedral is always extremely short, and the result was that I had to concentrate very hard for the Howells ‘Coll. Reg.’ morning canticles, which I’d never sung before. I knew more or less how the Te Deum went, because it is often broadcast; but that left the Jubilate, and the rhythms of the Te Deum are also irregular and very easy to mis-count. The other new piece for me was Tallis’ Loquebantur variis linguis.

Saturday evensong was almost entirely music by Sumsion, who is not a favourite of mine. He goes in for long phrases that I find meander about with no great sense of direction. I’ll make a partial exception for a couple of anthems where this becomes a more positive feature because it illustrates the words, as with ‘In exile’ (depicting the lamentation of the exiles) or in Saturday’s anthem ‘They that go down to the sea in ships’ (rolling waves). Another exception, for a different reason, is his Responses (which we also did on Saturday); here the format imposes limitations, so that your Sumsion comes in handy bite-sized chunks. At least I’m promised some items from my wishlist in Priory Voices events later in the year.

The choir’s next outing is at Wells Cathedral next weekend. Astonishingly, I’ve lived in the diocese for some eight years and never sung a service at Wells, only Bath Camerata concerts. I can’t sing the whole weekend, but have been given a special dispensation to join the choir for Sunday evensong.

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Biber in the Festival

Posted on May 26, 2004 by vhk10

I’m not going to very many concerts in the Bath Festival this year – I don’t have many free evenings, and also this is another year when the Bath Festival Chorus is not performing.
I usually get to a concert in the Abbey; this venue often sells out or nearly so despite its size. Last year it was a performance of ‘Dido and Aeneas’ which I remember largely for a rarely-heard guitar interlude (though having heard it I could see why it was usually left out) and an extraordinary spoken postlude in which the only word I could clearly make out was ‘Protestant’. (The postlude was dropped when the performance was repeated at the Proms).
This time it was Biber’s Missa Christi Resurgentis, receiving its first modern performance in Europe from the English Concert. (My knowledge is a bit incomplete because the programmes had sold out by the time I arrived). The concert got a five-star-rated review in the Guardian. When I hear choral music unfamiliar to me, I usually end up thinking what it would be like to perform it. In this case, the music was pleasant enough to listen to, but I don’t think I’d find it so interesting to sing, at least if I were in the second choir. Although the choral writing was far from dull, I had the impression that the composer was often really interested in the orchestral parts rather than the vocal lines. I should qualify this by saying that I was sitting in a side aisle where the orchestra came over more strongly than the choir. The Mass was interspersed with instrumental pieces, topped and tailed by plainchant sung by the choir (and some of the orchestra!) as they processed in and out, and the whole concert finished with the humorous ‘nightwatchman’s serenade’. It was short – only just over an hour of music without an interval – and will go out on Radio 3 next week.

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lots of Mags and Nuncs

Posted on May 17, 2004 by vhk10

Some generous birthday presents have helped me to buy the Priory Records complete Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis series in 21 CDs (Disclaimer: I have no financial or other interest in Priory Records). I’ve been listening to all the discs to check that there are no problems with any of them.

I won’t attempt to review the entire set here but I’ll nominate some of my favourites: Chichester (for the Holst Nunc and Smart in G), Truro (because I’ve sung almost all the settings on this disc), Keble College (the only mixed-voice recording – I identify with the choral sound but am not so keen on their organ) and New College (an ambitious programme including the Finzi and Swayne Magnificats and the Byrd ‘Great’ service). Anyone looking at this last should note that my copy at least has both Mag and Nunc from the Great Service, on a single track. My special award for best liner notes goes to Paul Trepte’s on the Ely disc.
I expect to use these recordings to prepare for performances of some of these settings. To help me locate them, I’ve created an index to the set, ordered by composer. I can supply this in Word or Excel form for anyone who’s interested.

I’ll return to this set in another posting, and consider the choice of canticles (including identifying the well-known setting which they’ve unaccountably not recorded!).

[I’ve now found a review of the series here]

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my time in the Exon Singers

Posted on May 10, 2004 by vhk10

I don’t have much going on at the moment to write about, but I see that someone searched this blog for references to the Exon Singers, so here is an account of my connexion with them.

Some years ago I was recruited at short notice to sing in the Exon Singers’ summer West Country tour, conducted by Christopher Tolley. Over the week I was with them, we performed in venues including Buckfast Abbey, Truro and Exeter Cathedrals, and the barn at Buckland Abbey.

It was clear that the membership of the choir was pretty stable, and for some years afterwards I had fun picking out the voices of people I recognised when the choir sang their Choral Evensong broadcast at New Year. There were also a lot of couples in it, which may have been connected to the fact that the free board and lodging laid on for us in Tavistock was only available to singers.

Most of the music we performed was new to me. I recall three (very diverse) pieces in particular: Byrd’s Laudibus in Sanctis (done on minimal rehearsal as everyone else had recently sung it with the choir), Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden (since learning which I’ve never had problems pitching augmented 4ths/diminished 5ths), and a setting of part of Dr Seuss’s Sleep Book by Roderick Williams.

The week was hard work because of all the new music, and in those days I was relatively inexperienced, but I enjoyed being part of such a good choir. I occasionally look back on it with nostalgia, especially at times when singing at that standard isn’t available to me. I see from the website that now Jeffrey Makinson, whom I knew in my Manchester days, plays for them, but they don’t seem to assemble at Tewkesbury over New Year any more.

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a longish Missa Brevis

Posted on May 7, 2004 by vhk10

The Chantry Singers have started rehearsing again. I have sung all three pieces in the next concert before, but in each case there’s a catch.

Firstly, the Little Organ Mass by Haydn. We are doing this with the extensions to the Gloria by Michael Haydn, who teased his brother’s music out by inserting sections of his own so that it no longer superimposes four lots of words simultaneously. I’ve done this adaptation once before (in Holy Name Church, Manchester) but I’ve done Haydn’s unadapted version many more times and it’s disconcerting to have the extra bits, particularly where a phrase begins as originally composed and then changes tack.

The Deutsches Magnificat by Schütz is still fresh in my mind as I performed it 18 months ago in the Brandon Hill Singers’ final concert. (I was reminded of this again the following day, when we had a work awayday at St. George’s Brandon Hill. As always when I go in there, I wondered why, when the church was made into a concert hall, they didn’t retain the musical instrument that was already there – the organ). This time though we are doing the Magnificat from a different edition with different barring, and I am singing in the first choir rather than the second.

I have sung Kodály’s Missa Brevis before, but it was a long time ago. It was also at a service in Ely Cathedral, and so I don’t think I sang the Kyrie or Creed, and certainly not the ‘Ite Missa Est’. It’s pretty substantial for a Missa Brevis (though shorter than Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle), and lasts a good half-hour on the recording I have.

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High, medium, or low

Posted on April 30, 2004 by vhk10

If a volume of songs comes in a choice of high or low keys, I will go for the high ones. If the options are high, medium or low, I usually choose medium, not seeing much point in using gratuitously high keys when I can reach the lower extremities easily too.
At the moment, I’m learning some Schumann songs from the ‘high’ Peters edition. My teacher suggested ‘Stille Tränen’, until we went through it and found that it was in C major. While this is within my range, it is not comfortable with two awkwardly placed top A’s and an (optional) B flat! To say nothing of the breathing problems I would lay up for myself by doing it in this key. Meanwhile, the lowest note is the G above middle C. Elsewhere in the volume ‘Die Nonne’, for example, has a range of middle C to the second E above it. So why isn’t ‘Stille Tränen’ in (say) B flat? I can think of a couple of possibilities:

a) perhaps Schumann originally wrote the song in C and the editors wished to preserve this
b) the song wanders into a remote key in the middle section. If it were in B flat, both singer and pianist would be confronted by double flats. But the difficulty of reading these would go once you’d learnt the song, while those high notes remain as high as ever!

The most demanding range I’ve seen in an edition offering a choice of pitches was a song in a ‘low voice’ edition of Samuel Barber which went up to top C! I assume that this particular song is only done in one key.

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choosing where to go

Posted on April 26, 2004 by vhk10

The main season for going to sing in Cathedrals is coming up; it looks like my next outing will be Lincoln at the end of the month. I am now on the books of half-a-dozen choirs that go on Cathedral visits and receive at least twice as many invitations as I can accept. So how do I choose between them?

a) Obviously, I have to be available to sing. This means that the choirs that are slowest in letting me know what they plan doing have less chance of getting hold of me. (This doesn’t mean, though, that I’m never able to sign up at very short notice.)
b) Also obviously, it’s more worthwhile performing music to a high standard. I’m not going to attempt any sort of ranking here of the choirs I sing in.
c) I am still waiting for an opportunity to sing in Birmingham, Leicester, Bradford or Wakefield Cathedrals, and a chance to do this will override almost anything else! But I’m also interested in other venues new to me, or revisiting a favourite (e.g. one with a fine acoustic, in a pleasant place or with especially welcoming clergy/staff).
d) I enjoy singing repertoire that’s new to me, even if it isn’t challenging in itself. Conversely, I get a bit bored if I know all the music performed very well. And like everyone, I have favourite pieces/composers which will make a fixture more appealing.
e) I’ve come across singers who will only sign up if there’s a substantial solo on offer in their voice. I’m not so fussy (for one thing, it assumes that you are likely to be offered the solo in question). But, other things being equal, I’m more likely to sing for a group which has offered me solos in the past. The rest of this post should make clear that other things usually aren’t equal.
f) On a residential tour (as opposed to a single service or a weekend within commuting distance of home) it’s important to enjoy the company of the others as you see a lot of them outside the choir stalls as well as in. In practice, the company always seems to be congenial.
g) I can think of two tours (both some years ago now) when almost all available time was used for rehearsing simply because the choir was there, resulting in 4-hour rehearsals in the morning and in one case another of at least 2 hours in the evening, in addition to time in the stalls. This over-rehearsal resulted in drab performances and in one case I’d lost my voice after a few days. Conversely, under-rehearsal, particularly of flagship services such as the Sunday eucharist and evensong, can be very frustrating because you know you can do so much better.

Singing the hymn ‘Good Christian men, rejoice and sing!’ for the fourth time in nine days makes me reflect on the relatively small number of Easter hymns, some of which would be doggerel if you took the Alleluias away. This ‘queen of seasons’ doesn’t do so well for anthems considering its importance; there are at least as many good ones for Ascensiontide which contains only one Sunday.

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mixed up in Westminster Cathedral

Posted on April 18, 2004 by vhk10

On Saturday the Cathedral Chamber Choir paid its first visit to Westminster Cathedral, to sing at the Saturday evening Mass. Most Roman Catholic Cathedrals in England don’t go in for visiting choirs the way that Anglican ones do, and it was the first time I’d sung a service in one of them (although I have sung at Catholic Masses many times both here and abroad).

We sang some movements from Victoria’s Mass Simile est regnum cælorum, and the first part of Guerrero’s motet Veni, amica mea. The second Agnus Dei of the Mass uses two choirs in canon with one another, while the Guerrero weaves lines around a cantus firmus in the second soprano part (for this reason I made sure I was singing first soprano!). I would have loved to have been able to hear the choir as well as sing in it, both because it was difficult to get a feel for how it sounded in the body of the church, and in order to get the proper effect of the Guerrero setting. The choir sits in the apse, behind the high altar, where it was possible to get a view of the (large) congregation but where you inevitably feel a bit cut off from the rest of the building.

Our conductor this time was Matthew O’Donovan, who is the only person I know of to have conducted a BBC choral evensong broadcast while still an undergraduate (he also conducted the Duruflé I wrote about in my last posting). He made us sing scrambled up so that no one was next to anyone singing the same part. I enjoy doing this, and one choir I was once in, the Cambridge Chamber Group, did it routinely: most memorably when we performed all six Bach motets this way over two concerts in one weekend. Even when I’m not singing in this formation, I often try to be on the edge of a part so I can hear what others are doing (easier, the smaller the choir is).

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Good Friday at St. Giles’

Posted on April 10, 2004 by vhk10

Good Friday brought a come-and-sing performance of Duruflé’s Requiem at St. Giles’s Church, Oxford. This work, with its irregular, fluid rhythms and frequent tempo changes, is anything but four-square, and so might not be an obvious candidate for a scratch performance on two hours’ rehearsal. However, the event attracted a rather higher calibre of singer than such events often do, and there was at least one person in each voice part who knew the work well enough to keep an eye on the conductor and give a lead. I had more or less recovered from a sore throat and cough which bothered me earlier in the week. And it was a chance to renew acquaintance with various people I hadn’t seen in a long time, or to meet others I’d heard about but not actually met, which made it worth the journey.

I own a vocal score, but as I didn’t want to take out a second mortgage it’s the edition with only the voice parts, not the organ, which is supplemented by a crib sheet for some of the less obvious leads (the blank three bars before the soprano entry at the beginning of the In Paradisum are especially unhelpful).

A performance of this piece in Manchester Cathedral at an All Souls’ Day eucharist was one of my favourite censer moments. As the trebles hit the top B flat in the Sanctus (the highest note of the piece) the thurifer swung the censer through the full 360 degrees. A rare chance for the altar party to show awareness of what the choir is doing!

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Rejoice in the Lamb

Posted on April 7, 2004 by vhk10

I sang this on Palm Sunday as part of a meditation of words and music for Holy Week, so not exactly a formal service but not a concert either. I was satisfied with the way my solo went – one of those exposed ones that can be safely given to trebles because they don’t realise just how exposed it is. I hadn’t realised before now how much the choir sings in unison, or in two parts doubled at the octave. We also sang Weelkes’ ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’ from the back of the church at the start. There was also some fake Italian baroque – Albinoni’s Adagio – and some of the real stuff – Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, done as a duet by two of the other singers.

On Saturday I went to an impressive concert in a local church given by the Exultate Singers, of Passiontide music including Leighton’s ‘Crucifixus pro nobis’ which I’d never heard live before. During the interval I got to meet their conductor for the first time.

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Rounds on the March

Posted on March 30, 2004 by vhk10

At the weekend I returned to Cambridge to take part in the March March march. Some of us enlivened the notorious Earith-Willingham stretch by singing rounds as we strode alongside the Great Ouse. A few years ago I compiled a list of various places on the route of the March, which could be sung to the tune of Frère Jacques, but this time we sang ‘Great Tom is cast’, another to the words ‘Viva la musica!’ and finally Byrd’s Non nobis, Domine. We couldn’t get this last to work, and now looking at an online edition (PDF – by David Till) I realise how we were going wrong.

On Sunday morning I went to Little St Mary’s Church, where I was married a few years ago and heard the choir sing a couple of motets. When I started singing there, the organist used to change about once a year, but now things are more stable. The current organist and choirmaster is Christian Rutherford, who plays horn in the Academy of Ancient Music. (I had Christopher Hogwood for a next-door neighbour nearby for a couple of years, but that’s another story!)

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