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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aimez-vous Brahms?

Posted on March 25, 2004 by vhk10

I read the novel of this title recently, though Brahms’ music doesn’t really feature in it except as a chat-up line. Last Saturday I sang in his German Requiem in Bath Abbey. For this the Chantry Singers joined forces with the Bristol Bach Choir, who are comparable apart from being rather more numerous. They don’t seem to be affected by the current shortage of singers relative to choirs in Bristol, as they have a substantial waiting list in some voices.

A few years ago I was sorry to miss an opportunity to sing this with the Bath Camerata. But that would have been with organ, and it really does need an orchestra. I can’t imagine being left cold by this work, but it was clear from talking to others in the choir that some of them were. Perhaps I’ll write about my own blind spots some other time.

It was hard work rehearsing this with small numbers, all the more so because some sopranos either weren’t doing this concert at all or were singing alto. I can think of few choral works I’ve sung which have such intensive choral writing, with little time off: Israel in Egypt, or Cherubini’s Requiem (the latter of which dispenses with soloists alogether). This time round I felt much more comfortable with the demands it made than I did when I first sang it.

The space for singers in the Abbey is limited by the narrow nave, and I was in about the fifth row of sopranos and altos (out of eight). This only works if everyone (especially towards the back) watches the beat closely, as I think we did. I don’t attempt to review here performances in which I took part, but I’m told we got a good writeup in the Bath Chronicle, though it didn’t make it to the online edition.

The next thing I do is Rejoice in the Lamb on Palm Sunday. I am doing the soprano/treble solo in this (for the first time); it has similar interplay of two against three to the Copland I did recently, but at a much slower tempo! Arrangements for Westminster Cathedral on April 17th are also falling into place nicely.

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Mid-Somerset madness

Posted on March 19, 2004 by vhk10

Actually, there wasn’t very much madness about it, but it makes a good headline. I competed as planned in the Mid-Somerset Festival yesterday, in two classes: the Handel aria class (where I performed Cara Sposa from Rinaldo) , and the English-language song after 1940 class (where I performed Dear March, come in! by Copland). In both I neither distinguished nor disgraced myself.

With hindsight I realise that I should have committed my songs to memory earlier, as this would have allowed me to concentrate more in performance on the expressive touches which the adjudicator found wanting. Losing my voice for a week earlier this month didn’t help, but the fact remains that I would have found this task less daunting if I were more in the habit of learning music from memory!

The adjudicator also commented (à propos Handel) that my tone was a bit uneven and generally my singing needed more physical involvement. This is a fair comment and Jane Manning said much the same to me when I took part in a workshop with her a couple of years ago, so there must be something in it. I admit that I can be lazy in this respect, particularly if I’m concentrating on other aspects of performance. Partly it is the legacy of some tension problems I used to have and which I hope I’ve now banished for good. But I sometimes sing as if they were still there. Also, in the past I’ve spent too much time in choirs where I was forced to choose between singing with projection and focus, and blending in with the people around me. In one case I even had to put up with persistent critical comments in my hearing about this from another singer. I vowed not to be intimidated into singing badly, but I still have a tendency to keep my head down (in both senses!)

Do I regret entering the competition? No. Would I do it again? Yes, I think so, if only to see if I could improve on my performances this time.

I used to be on an email list for singers and I remember how boring it could be when people analysed their own performances and technique at length. I’ll write again soon, about the Brahms Requiem (tomorrow night!)

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playing at services

Posted on March 15, 2004 by vhk10

While our organist has been away, I’ve had to play at some services at church. As I’m not an organist, this has usually meant playing hymns on the piano (and conducting unaccompanied mass settings) but I did play our small electronic chamber organ a couple of times. This instrument is clearly intended for secular use, or at least not for our sort of church. I have wondered about the effect of accompanying the psalm with ‘Rhythmic Wah’ (sounds like what babies do when they’re hungry) or the ‘O Salutaris’ with ‘Bossa Nova 2’.
Meanwhile, my day at the Mid-Somerset Festival gets ever nearer and is now only 3 days away. My main worry is of not doing myself justice – having a memory lapse or my voice going abruptly. And I wish there were some way of performing without being directly in competition with others. It was clear that many of us in the Brandon Hill Singers also sang solo, or in small groups, more than could be accommodated in solo slots in our concerts. From time to time I’d come across others in the choir doing this, and I suggested to some the idea of having a choir party where those who wanted could perform a short turn to the others. I’d have enjoyed this, for the chance to hear what others did rather than the opportunity to perform myself. But the choir folded and we all dispersed.

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Master of the Queen’s Music

Posted on March 10, 2004 by vhk10

At last it’s been announced that Peter Maxwell Davies will hold this post for the next ten years. I met him once (at least, we were in the same room!) when he was director of the Dartington summer school.

For the last hundred years, it’s been the intention that the Master should be a distinguished composer. They haven’t always stood the test of time, though; is anything by Walter Parratt, other than a few Anglican chants, still performed? And I struggle to think of anything by Walford Davies, other than a few anthems, short organ pieces, military marches, and, erm, Anglican chants. I can’t imagine anyone naming their son Walford in his honour now, as someone did in about 1960 (I once went on a choir tour with this Walford’s wife). Actually, I find it pretty hard to imagine anyone doing this even in 1960. I think Maxwell Davies’ major compositions will not be so easily forgotten, even if he hasn’t written any Anglican chants.

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the missing chamber choirs of Manchester

Posted on March 2, 2004 by vhk10

In the mid 1990’s I lived in Manchester, and moved there with high hopes of lots of interesting singing possibilities. Looking back on that time now, I am still baffled and dismayed by the fact that, fresh from a choral award at Cambridge, I never found a place there in a good, small choir that met frequently, despite four years of trying.

There was a great shortage of such choirs, for which I suggest some possible reasons below. Places in the choirs that existed were jealously guarded and rarely fell vacant. At the time I moved away, neither the Manchester Chorale nor the Maia Singers had had a soprano vacancy for some three years. With hindsight, I was wasting my time even enquiring about joining them! The William Byrd Singers went for two years without a vacancy before I auditioned, unsuccessfully (I was competing against someone returning to the choir after an absence, and against a vocal student at the RNCM). I did however sing with the John Powell Singers, a chamber choir who performed occasional concerts, services and radio broadcasts.

I’ve sometimes come across singers of about my standard who held down places in more than one of these choirs. I therefore estimate that during 1992-96 the soprano places in the chamber choirs I knew about were filled by no more than 30 singers, in an urban area with a population of millions!

I realised how limited Manchester’s chamber choir scene had been when I moved, and had no difficulty in finding singing at the right level in Bath or Bristol. I also suspect that had I been a tenor or bass, I’d have found a place in a choir of this type in Manchester just as easily. Perhaps I was just unlucky, as I’ve heard of other singers having similar experiences elsewhere.

I attribute the shortage of chamber choirs partly to the strong North of England tradition of large choral societies. Also possibly to a lack of suitable performance venues. (Early in the 20th century almost all the parish churches in Manchester city centre were closed and demolished. No one thought of turning one of them into a small concert hall, similar to St. George’s in Bristol). Or maybe to low audiences for chamber choir concerts.

If anyone who was singing in Manchester at this time reads this, I’d be interested to hear their comments. Why were there so few chamber choirs, and such a low turnover of sopranos? Did none of them ever move away from the area or take time out to have a baby? Were the choirs’ waiting lists for auditions organised or chaotic? Was I trying the wrong choirs? Were there others which would have suited me, but whose publicity I never saw? Is the situation better now?

I have now also written about my experiences with Manchester’s church choirs.

I’ve closed this item to comments now but I received an interesting comment on it here.

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