Handel in the hymnbook and out

Posted on January 20, 2004 by vhk10

It is at this time of year that I wonder ‘What is it about the hymn Brightest and best that attracts tunes with awkward intervals?’.

What I think of as the standard tune, ‘Epiphany’, is straightforward enough. But I have also sung it to a tune offered in the English Hymnal, the Bach chorale ‘Liebster Emmanuel’ which is the only hymn tune I can think of offhand with a diminished fourth in it (easy enough if you’re used to singing Purcell, of course). It has an octave drop in the middle of one line too, but this is harmless enough compared with the next possibility.

If you go to Bath Abbey in Epiphany you may well be invited to sing the hymn to the tune ‘Bede’ from Hymns Ancient and Modern, which is one of the hardest tunes for the congregation I’ve ever encountered. (I discount occasions such as the wedding where the congregation sang ‘Wachet Auf’ in Bach’s arrangement, top G’s and all!). There are plenty of notes in this one, often more than one to a syllable (and the lines of the hymn have 10 or 11 syllables each). Any member of the congregation who attempts to sing along and gets as far as the third line will usually be shaken off by having to sing two intervals of a seventh and one of an octave! If this sounds rather unvocal, it’s because the tune is adapted from an instrumental work by Handel (I believe).

You can find MIDI versions of the first two tunes at:
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/b/r/brightes.htm

On Saturday I went to hear Bath Baroque doing a miscellaneous programme with a loosely applied ‘royal’ theme. Two of Handel’s Coronation Anthems were sung by some of the Exultate Singers, including one or two former Brandon Hill Singers known to me.

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Westminster Abbey (2)

Posted on January 12, 2004 by vhk10

On January 2nd most of us were back again, this time for a service where I’d sung neither canticles nor anthem before (a rare thing!).

Our canticles were Stanford in F. On singing them I realised why I hadn’t done them before; apart from one or two nice moments, they just aren’t very interesting. We chose them because the Abbey observes a liturgical ‘dress-down Friday’ by asking for unaccompanied canticles. We didn’t want to do anything Tudor or Renaissance because we’d done that the previous day. There aren’t many unaccompanied later canticle settings; the only other Mag and Nunc pair I can think of is Naylor in A (Tonus Peregrinus, anyone?). [April 2004 – Add Gray in F minor. All three of these are for double choir] An alternative approach would be to take a free-standing unaccompanied Mag (e.g. Finzi, Stanford in B flat for double choir, Swayne) or Nunc (e.g. Howells, Holst) and either mix’n’match it with a setting of the other canticle or pair it with a plainchant setting.

The anthem was O magnum mysterium by Morten Lauridsen. This is one of those long, slow moving, almost wholly diatonic pieces with repeated phrases, whose notes can be learnt in less time than it takes to perform the piece (Gorecki’s Totus Tuus is another). As with other such pieces, I found it suprisingly difficult to sing.

The Abbey has already indicated that we would be welcome to come again so I hope to have another go at finding Purcell’s memorial on a future visit.

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Westminster Abbey (1)

Posted on January 7, 2004 by vhk10

On New Year’s Day/Jan 2nd I was singing Evensong in Westminster Abbey with the Cathedral Chamber Choir. Our programme for the first service was especially appealing to me: the Gibbons 2nd service and Gibbons’ anthem ‘See, see the Word is incarnate’, a piece I’d long been keen to sing. (I see that these pieces are also appearing on next week’s Radio 3 Choral Evensong broadcast). Gibbons is my favourite Tudor composer – there is an urgency and flamboyance about much of his music compared with that of his contemporaries. In fact I think the Second Service is my favourite set of canticles; there is so much variety in it with barely a change of tempo needed!

The OUP edition of the canticles we used is beginning to show its age (1930’s) in some ways, especially in its wariness of a discord in the Gloria to the Magnificat: ‘this note should be sung very lightly’. I suppose in the 19th century the dissonance would have been edited out altogether. But at least we were all using the same edition! For the anthem, the choir was using two different editions because of a shortage of copies and all the usual variations between them cropped up: different key, different pagination, different underlay, different barring, different distribution of music between voices and different expression and dynamic markings! This always eats up rehearsal time.

I attempted to visit two special (to me) places at the Abbey. Leading off the main cloister is a passage going to another, smaller cloister, and off this second cloister is another passage going to a garden which few of the thousands of visitors to the Abbey ever reach. It’s a pleasant place to spend an odd moment outside rehearsals, but I have never succeeded in working out its opening hours at this time of year. This time it was open on New Year’s Day but not on the Friday.

I also wanted to go and pay my respects at the monument to Purcell, in his old workplace, as he is one of my favourite composers. As the Abbey is a major tourist attraction, and in recent years has also become a waiting room for people about to catch Eurostar trains from Waterloo, visitors are constrained to follow a circuit in one direction round the building. As a member of a visiting choir you do not have to pay admission, but you still have to go with the flow once inside. The choir as a whole is also marshalled carefully about; for example, after evensong you are led back into the cloister, the door is shut behind you and you can’t re-enter the building to hear the organ voluntary! I have now discovered that Purcell’s monument is in the north choir aisle, but I didn’t find an opportunity to go and look at it. I’m not even sure that the north choir aisle is open apart from for a few minutes immediately before services, when as a member of the choir I can’t get to it because I’m lined up in the cloister waiting to process in.

I’ll hold over an account of the second Evensong till my next posting.

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my musical resolutions for 2004

Posted on December 31, 2003 by vhk10

a) to sing some more things on the wishlist
b) to get to sing at last with the Bath Festival Chorus
c) to sing in at least one new Cathedral. As I have bookings for Gloucester and Sheffield, this resolution at least looks as if it will be fulfilled.
d) to get at least an audition with either the Exultate Singers of Bristol or the Paragon Singers in Bath. At various times in 2003 the conductors of both choirs contacted me to say they would be in touch again ‘soon’, and I have heard nothing further. It’s difficult to know in this situation whether you will do yourself harm or good by reminding them that they’ve said this.
By comparison with other recent years, 2003 wasn’t a good one for solos. It would be nice if I had more in 2004, especially in those choirs where I haven’t ever done one, but of course this is in the hands of other people.

In a year’s time I’ll look back on 2004 and see how much of this has or hasn’t happened! [Results here]. The year gets off to a flying start with singing Evensong in Westminster Abbey on New Year’s Day (with music by Gibbons) and January 2nd.

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homegrown CDs

Posted on December 29, 2003 by vhk10

Just before Christmas I received something I’d forgotten all about – a CD of some of the music I sang at Salisbury in August. It’s now much easier to produce short runs of CDs at a sensible price than it used to be, and I think good recording equipment has got cheaper too. The Chantry Singers concert last week was recorded for future release, and a CD was made of the Cathedral Chamber Choir Salisbury tour in 2002, which I send to prospective venues as a sample of what the choir can do. And just about every church choir seems to be doing one these days!

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a radiophonic Christmas

Posted on December 26, 2003 by vhk10

Like many people, I got a digital radio for Christmas. It won’t really increase the number of classical music channels I can receive, but it will allow me to hear what there is with better quality sound anywhere in the house.

I realise how privileged television is over radio when I have to explain yet again to someone that the ‘Carols from King’s’ broadcast on TV on Christmas Eve is not the Nine Lessons and Carols service, although it may contain some of the same music. It is a recording made earlier in December; I was once invited to be in the ‘congregation’ at the recording session though I didn’t take part in the end. Sometimes the previous year’s TV recording is repeated. The presence of televison cameras and lighting equipment at the Christmas Eve Nine Lessons service would ruin the atmosphere for people in the chapel, and so it is never televised.

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9 lessons and the Pump Room

Posted on December 22, 2003 by vhk10

The Chantry Singers concert in the Pump Room happened on Saturday night. Despite fears about the ever-increasing number of Christmas concerts by other choirs (at least 3 others in the area that night), it more or less sold out. Vocally it was not too taxing as there were no notes above a G and not many of those. (It wouldn’t have been very different if I’d sung 1st soprano rather than 2nd).

My high notes got more of a workout the following night when I was singing 9 Lessons and Carols in Bathwick. This must be the first time in over ten years that I’ve done such a service. I was one of a number of extras drafted in and the choir made a strong sound, necessary because the hymns were accompanied by 8 (!) brass players. I knew all about it because I was right in front of them and in fact had to position myself very carefully, guided by the pattern of tiles on the church floor, so that one of the trumpeters could see the conductor. (I believe the BBC does positioning by painting footprints on the floor!) Our guest conductor was Anthony Crossland, formerly of Wells Cathedral. Several of the carols had a local connexion, including Clifford Harker’s arrangement of Away in a Manger, the soupiest I’ve ever encountered.

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Il Trovatore at the Hippodrome

Posted on December 19, 2003 by vhk10

I went to hear ‘Il Trovatore’ at the Bristol Hippodrome last week, done by the Welsh National Opera. WNO doesn’t have the 4 best singers in the world that this opera is said to require, but the principals were all well matched once they’d sung themselves in. When I was sold my ticket, the box office warned me that I wouldn’t have a view of the surtitles, which I felt was not necessarily a drawback, given the libretto! (My favourite surtitle moment was at a performance of Ernani I went to in Manchester once: ‘Heavens! It’s the King’. Very hard not to snigger).

I realised how much Verdi’s music redeems the plot of the opera when I heard La Juive on the radio the following night. The dénument of the two operas is very similar; someone condemns another to die, then is told just as it is too late that the other is a close relative, the information having been witheld until then in order to achieve revenge. Halévy’s libretto handles the psychological side of of this in more depth, but Verdi’s music transcends the limitations of his.

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cutting the Messiah

Posted on December 12, 2003 by vhk10

On Saturday I went to hear the Bath Choral Society perform the Messiah in Bath Abbey. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone else sing this work live before as I get to perform it myself every three years or so. This time a colleague had a ticket and couldn’t go herself.

The performance was a traditional one, with modern pitch and a large chorus; at the Hallelujah Chorus the entire audience stood up (rather than just a bold few), the choir sang from memory and the soloists joined in, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

There were also some standard cuts in parts 2 and 3. Uncut performances are commoner than they were (maybe faster speeds have something to do with this?) but I’ve done the work with a variety of omissions, the most bizarre being all but the tail end of ‘All we like sheep’. I’m always rather sorry not to have ‘Let all the angels of God worship him’, a punchy little number which is the first thing to go if anything is cut. I once sang in a performance on limited rehearsal time where the conductor had included ‘But thanks be to God’ because he liked the words. To his horror he found that practically no one knew it because it’s usually cut, and it’s not easy; it then took over a large chunk of the rehearsal time.

Meanwhile the Cathedral Chamber Choir has secured a date at Westminster Cathedral in April 2004, and I note with regret that I won’t be able to sing in the Erleigh Cantors concert in February. They are doing the Giles Swayne Magnificat which I’d certainly love to do; I’ll have to hope that it gets programmed for an evensong some time.

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Bath Abbey

Posted on December 2, 2003 by vhk10

The Rector of Bath Abbey, Simon Oberst, has just resigned with immediate effect. I can’t comment further on this but I am sorry to see him go and I hope it doesn’t take as long to find a new Rector as it did last time (the job had to be advertised twice). When he arrived a couple of years ago I hoped that he would be good for the choral life of the Abbey, as he is himself a singer of professional standard.


The Abbey maintains a couple of choirs and over the last few years the pattern of choral services has changed to accommodate them. I am still waiting for the long-promised Friday evensongs sung by the Abbey girls’ choir. However, they have at least now learnt some psalms other than no. 67, which for a long time was the only one I ever heard them sing!

Recently the mixed choir which used to sing at the Abbey evening prayer service on Sundays disbanded. Maybe it was felt that 3 choral services on a Sunday was enough, but it reduces still further the already very limited opportunities in Bath’s parish churches (of which the Abbey is the principal one). I wonder where the girls in the girls’ choir will sing the church music they’ve learnt when they grow up?

I don’t get to Sunday services at the Abbey much now, but when I can I go to Saturday Evensong with visiting choirs, which I’ve sung myself a couple of times. For an account of such a service, see this. Here I hope that I’ve caused an improvement. For a long time, the hymn ‘The day Thou gavest’ was sung at at least half of these services; I suspect that it was being routinely suggested to the choirs at the last minute by the vergers, as this happened when I was visiting the Abbey once with a choir. When I went one January hoping to sing a nice Epiphany hymn which can only be sung on a few weeks in the year and got ‘The day Thou gavest’ yet again, I emailed the Abbey pointing out how boring it was for people who attended Saturday evensongs regularly, and suggesting they might consider printing it on the service sheet rather than giving out hymnbooks! Since then it’s been given a rest.

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John Rutter

Posted on November 28, 2003 by vhk10

Chantry Singers are doing 3 pieces by John Rutter in our concert. As someone once said to me ‘We don’t have Christmas-tide any more – it’s Rutter-tide’. I’m not a huge fan (there’s only so much ‘oo’ and ‘ah’ ing accompaniment I can take), but there’s no denying he can write catchy tunes. I’ve heard a rumour that he has written jingles for BBC Radio 2 and when I first went to Japan I wondered whether he also wrote the snatches of melody which are played on bullet trains as they approach stations. There was one on the shinkansen between Sendai and Tokyo which sounded very like the introduction to the Sans Day Carol! No, it’s more likely Japanese composers who’ve been to carol concerts full of arrangements from ‘Carols for Choirs’. [2019 update: they still do this!]

Now how many people buy recordings by the Cambridge Singers thinking that the choir is something to do with Cambridge? Many of the singers have studied at Cambridge, but that’s about as far as it goes. I lived in Cambridge for six years and they never performed there; in fact I don’t know that they give concerts anywhere or do anything apart from meet in London to make recordings.

A fine cartoon in the latest Private Eye: two choirboys in the stalls, one saying to the other ‘I can’t believe it’s not Rutter…!’. I don’t expect most of the readership will get the joke though.

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things I’d like to sing (1)

Posted on November 21, 2003 by vhk10

I haven’t much time this week, so I’m posting a list of pieces of church music which I’d really like to sing and which I’ve been sending to the conductors of some of the choirs I sing in when they’ve asked for suggestions. In a couple of cases it’s out of date because I’ve performed the piece in the meantime. At some point I’ll post the wishlist of the bigger choral works I’d like to do.

a) Byrd ‘Laetentur coeli’. I sang this over twenty years ago in my first term at Oxford, and it’s forever associated with that time because I have never done it since. [I got to sing this with the Erleigh Cantors in Winchester in 2006]
b) Byrd ‘Great Service’ I can but ask …. [My chance came in October 2019.]
c) Gibbons Te Deum ‘Second Service’. Not the Te Deum from the Short Service which is Gibbons on auto-pilot. This one has verse parts.
d) Weelkes Five-part service. Which is really Weelkes’ ten-part service. I did just the Mag a year ago – I’d like to tackle the Nunc too.
e) Tomkins ‘Almighty God the fountain of all wisdom’ Some really juicy false relations here.
f) Purcell ‘O Lord God of Hosts’. Another piece I have not done since my first term at university, probably because of the eight-part verse sections.
g) Purcell ‘Jehova, quam multi sunt hostes mei’. My all-time favourite anthem which I have never sung. It has a (tricky) tenor and (deep) bass solo. Some stunning discords and juxtapositions of keys – it’s never been surpassed by anything similar since. [I have now sing this – in Durham Cathedral.]
I could nominate lots more Purcell but I’ll move on.
h) Haydn ‘Insanae et vanae curae’ Heard this on a broadcast the other week – a bit naff but I love it. [I’ve since sung it – in Bristol last summer]
i) Smart Evening Canticles in G. Only Chichester Cathedral choir seem to sing these, though I did sing them once in about 1987. Virtuosic and fluent 5-part counterpoint.
j) Elgar Te Deum. I think this is much better than the Vaughan Williams which you hear more often – like a bit of Gerontius that got away. But it’s expansive, i.e. long! Organists seem to like it too.
[I sang this again with the Erleigh Cantors in Salisbury in 2006.]
k) Gray ‘What are these that glow from afar?’ This is long, maybe suitable for a Saturday or Sunday evensong. Sounds fun to sing.
l) Day Evening Canticles in B flat. I’m not so smitten with these as with the other things on the list but I feel it’s a gap that I’ve never sung them!
m) Howells Evening Canticles ‘St. Paul’s’ ‘What, has Virginia never done these?’ Well, of course I have, but as it happens not since 1991 (!), and they are my favourite Howells setting, because of the sweeping vocal lines. [I have since sung these with Priory Voices in Gloucester Cathedral, and with the Erleigh Cantors in Salisbury]. For that matter, I’ve never sung Howells in B minor, though I’ve heard them often enough. [Now done]
n) Lloyd Responses (2nd set) (i.e. not the ones written for Hereford – I think this set were written for Durham). I get so envious every time I hear another choir sing these. [not any more as I’ve sung them several times since I compiled the list!]
Another gap – I’ve never sung anything by Philip Moore and I like his compositions. [Now sung a few though his canticles elude me. We do ‘It is a thing most wonderful’ quite often in church.]

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