Dyson’s Canterbury Pilgrims

Posted on October 13, 2003 by vhk10

On Saturday I sang in a performance of this given by the St. Mary’s Festival Chorus (an choir expanded around the choir of the other church in the parish). This work is sufficiently good not to disappear into obscurity but not so good as to be a standard part of the repertoire. I think Dyson was hampered by his text, which is extracts from Chaucer’s prologue to the Canterbury tales, somewhat modernised (thereby losing some of their natural rhythm). It’s pretty wordy and there aren’t always obvious places for the big climaxes needed to keep an audience’s attention. (e.g. there has to be one on the words ‘And gladly did he learn and gladly teach’). I believe the orchestration is good, but we lost that as we were accompanied on piano in this performance.

Sadly we had a small audience, possibly because of competing events on the same day (I was invited to sing in four).

Our conductor is organist of the Lord Mayor’s Chapel in Bristol, so I took the opportunity to check that I’m still on his dep list (I’ve been on it for several years without ever having been called on to sing a service!)

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Vivaldi’s Gloria in Derby

Posted on October 9, 2003 by vhk10

On Saturday I sang in a ‘come and sing’ performance in Derby Cathedral of Vivaldi’s Gloria and Fauré’s Requiem, in aid of a local hospice. My reasons for performing in this event were explained in the last entry. Come and sing performances tend to be rather scrappy because the choir is all-comers and there is only very limited rehearsal time. But this one had some merits. One was the chance to sing the Vivaldi, which I’d never done before (apart from singing the Laudamus Te duet in a service at Holy Trinity, Cambridge once). Also we got fed a buffet before the concert (all the Bakewell tart you could eat!)

Because I hadn’t done the Vivaldi before, I encountered one big problem. I borrowed a Ricordi vocal score from the library, but the edition is about half a century old and clearly in the meantime someone has found some extra bars that Ricordi left out – mostly in solo movements, but also a few in the second choral movement. At first I quickly checked I was singing what was in my score, next I assumed everyone else was coming in a beat too late (it’s happened before!) but then I realised they were also singing different words and at that point I abandoned Ricordi and got hold of a hire copy provided for singers who didn’t have their own.

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Cathedrals

Posted on October 2, 2003 by vhk10

I have an ambition to perform in all 42 Church of England Cathedrals in England. This formed while I was singing with various Cambridge college choirs in the late 1980’s and visiting a lot of cathedrals on days out or summer tours. After I’d sung in about a dozen I thought it would be fun to go to all the rest. Since then, I’ve managed a couple of new ones on average every year. This year so far I’ve sung in two new Cathedrals (Lichfield and Southwell) and am about to perform in a third (Derby). Then there will remain only six to go: Gloucester, Sheffield, Leicester, Birmingham, Wakefield and Bradford (the last being notoriously hard to get to perform in).

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Bruckner

Posted on September 22, 2003 by vhk10

We had a special evensong on Saturday to end an ‘open day’ at church. We sang Walmisley in D minor and for an anthem, Locus Iste by Bruckner. We don’t usually do anthems but when we do it’s often Bruckner (we sang Ecce sacerdos for the bishop a few weeks ago). Probably because it’s the nearest our organist can get to Wagner. Leitmotifs have a way of creeping into his improvisations and the hymn with the tune from Parsifal always makes an appearance at Ascensiontide (not to mention the one with the tune from Meistersinger at other times).

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Parish choir singing

Posted on September 15, 2003 by vhk10

Yesterday I sang ‘Panis Angelicus’ during Benediction at church. I am unusual among the singers in the local choirs I know well, in that I sing regularly in a parish church. From my knowledge of the Chantry Singers, Bath Camerata and Paragon Singers, I can’t think of a single one of their singers who does so. (By singing regularly I mean most weeks, not just occasional festival services or cherry-picking solos). I would love to be corrected on this. If the Brandon Hill Singers were anything to go by, the overlap between chamber choirs and church choirs in Bristol is greater – it could hardly be much smaller!

Meanwhile I have recently had some interest from Gloucester (to whom I wrote in April) in a visit from the Cathedral Chamber Choir. Birmingham Cathedral have replied but they don’t take choirs for weekends except in August, only Saturdays (presumably they have a voluntary choir of their own). And St. Mary Redcliffe haven’t replied yet.

(May 2004) I know that several knowledgeable Bathonians have visited this site and no one has come up with a counter-example to my generalisation above – so I conclude sadly that it’s likely to be true.

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Brandon Hill Singers

Posted on September 12, 2003 by vhk10

Until last Christmas I sang with the Brandon Hill Singers, a chamber choir based in Bristol. I greatly enjoyed this, but unfortunately the choir went into a sudden decline and disbanded. The prevailing opinion seems to be that there were lots of choirs in Bristol chasing a limited pool of singers; during a gap between two conductors a number left to join other choirs, and the remaining singers were no longer viable as a group. For unconnected reasons I had a year out from the choir at around this time, so I didn’t see the process at close hand. I prefer this sort of situation to that where there are not enough choirs of the right size/standard for all the people who want to sing in them, and the choirs that there are have an almost stagnant membership (I’ll post my thoughts on my experiences in Manchester some time). It’s just a shame that it was the choir I sang in that went under.

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a wedding

Posted on September 9, 2003 by vhk10

On Saturday I sang at a wedding at church. The main thing the choir was needed for was the choral part of the Lohengrin wedding march. When I do this I am always amused that the words make it pretty clear that the march is into a bedroom, not a church!
Brides and grooms will happily spend lots of money (all right, about 10% of the cost of the wedding dress) on a choir and then waste them by making them sing mostly in unison (3 out 4 hymns at this wedding). They also rarely supply them with an order of service each so that they can be sure what to sing when and indeed sing the same words as the congregation (you can be sure that the words in the church’s hymn book will differ from those on the sheet). Our wedding avoided these pitfalls.

Meanwhile I’ve had to decline an invitation to sing evensong at Bath Abbey with the choir of the village where I grew up, which is visiting. I wrote below that I hoped it would be a long time before I was asked to sing the Balfour Gardiner again; in fact it was all of a week as that’s what they’re doing.

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Good Friday with the Bath Camerata

Posted on September 5, 2003 by vhk10

So what did I do earlier in the year? One thing was joining the Bath Camerata for their Good Friday performance of Mozart’s Requiem in Wells Cathedral. These days the Good Friday concerts, when the choir is expanded with former members, are the only times I sing with this choir, and in fact I hadn’t been able to do a Good Friday for a few years. So it was exciting to be in such excellent vocal company again, especially as the Cathedral was full for the concert. There was a new piece ‘Why weepest thou in wild array’, to which I and the other additional singers contributed plainchant interludes while everyone else was distributed around the building.

Sadly, it wasn’t such a success from the social point of view. Because I hadn’t sung with the choir for a while, I think few of them remembered me; at any rate only a couple of them asked me how I was and what I’d been doing, and in the performance I and the other imported singers were shunted on to a back row behind the others where I couldn’t see the conductor (until someone in front of me decided at the last minute not to sing).

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Audition

Posted on September 5, 2003 by vhk10

I had an audition to rejoin the Chantry Singers (with whom I used to sing) earlier this week. I really dread auditions – much worse than doing solos in front of large numbers of people. This time at least I was able to demonstrate I wasn’t bluffing when I said I could go at least up to B flat, though my mind blanked when I had to sing the middle note of a chord! Sight singing (Lassus) was OK, especially as I had sung the piece a year or so ago (I owned up to this). The standard sight-singing test at auditions used to be the Sanctus from Byrd’s 4-part Mass. For a prepared piece I used one of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder which I’d recently learnt. (I used to do Mozart’s Laudate Dominum, but I felt I’d had enough of it after a while). Anyway I shall be rejoining the Chantry Singers for their Christmas concert.

(Written March 2004) A number of people have posted here asking how they get started with auditioning and realising their potential as singers.

I have a number of contacts in choirs around Britain, but can’t help with specific places elsewhere. If you’re looking for a choir in Britain, I recommend British Choirs on the Net.

If you aren’t in Britain, the chances of someone in your area reading your contribution to what is now a fairly old article in my blog are extremely small. I can only offer the following advice:

Try to have some lessons. Failing that, find out who the good choir trainers in your area are and join one of their choirs. You may learn a lot about how to sing well from what they say in rehearsal. Your local community choir might be a good place to start. If you know someone who sings well, ask them where they learnt/are learning. But make sure you get some singing, rather than just staying on a waiting list!

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Singing in Llandaff

Posted on September 1, 2003 by vhk10

I did three days of a trip to Llandaff Cathedral with the Cathedral Chamber Choir. No music new to me here* and I got the Balfour Gardiner Evening Hymn for the third time in 4 weeks! I hope it’s a long, long time before I’m asked to sing it again, because I find it a pretty vacuous piece (the musical material of the central section is particularly thin). I sang at Llandaff once before, with my college choir at Cambridge and it hadn’t changed much except for some building between the song school and the Cathedral, no longer singing a setting of the Creed (it was the only cathedral where I’ve ever done that) and not getting a drinks party with the clergy after the Sunday Eucharist. And, to my great relief, the guided tour no longer turns up during the Magnificat every night – it made Evensong feel like feeding time at the zoo!
*except the variant Rose Response which is suitable for the Welsh liturgy.

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Proms concert

Posted on August 29, 2003 by vhk10

I got away to London on Wednesday and went to the Proms concert with Mark Wigglesworth and the London Philharmonic. This included Berg’s Seven Early Songssung by Christine Brewer (the first professional performance I’ve heard live since I learnt some of the songs five years ago), also Brahms’ first symphony and excerpts from Tannhäuser. I enjoyed it despite some rather dodgy woodwind moments – also the Seven Early Songs are lightly scored and got a bit lost in the Albert Hall.
I would have enjoyed it even more if I hadn’t had to frantically rush around for a taxi (the one I ordered didn’t turn up) afterwards in order to get the 21.33 train home. The later trains were replaced by buses because of engineering on the line and had I missed the 21.33 I would not have returned home till 1.30 a.m. There have been dozens of these ’emergency’ works on the line since I moved to Bath seven years ago and I estimate that they have affected about half of my attempts to have a midweek night out in London during that time.

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a weekend at Southwell

Posted on August 19, 2003 by vhk10

I went to Southwell Minster at the weekend with the Open University Chapel Choir, having been recruited when the conductor saw on my web page that I wanted to sing at Southwell. I can see why I haven’t been there before, as they don’t get many visiting choirs. We sang several Tudor pieces, also a canticle setting by the conductor, and an anthem which managed to go all six pages without changing key. I think I can only go so long without a key change, unless it’s early music, or not in a key to start with!

We also sang a service at Upton church nearby, from the tower of which it is claimed you can see two cathedrals (Southwell and Lincoln) on a clear day.

I’ve just written to Birmingham Cathedral and St. Mary Redcliffe to see if they will have one of my other choirs (the Cathedral Chamber Choir) for a weekend in 2004. It’s the second shot at writing to Birmingham as I never had a reply to my letter of a few months ago. [I did get a reply in the end.]

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