lauter Zucker sein

Posted on February 28, 2023 by vhk10

This line from the text of Bach’s motet Jesu, meine Freude felt appropriate to the Paragon Singers’ study day at St Swithin’s Church, as we were plied with large quantities of home-made cake morning and afternoon!

I felt I was owed some Bach motets. Jesu meine Freude was the first I sang, back in my Oxford days. A little later in Cambridge I performed all six in two concerts on consecutive nights, with no accompaniment and the singers scrambled up, not in parts. Around that time I also sang Lobet dem Herrn on a College choir tour to bemused holidaymakers in a hotel TV room in Hungary, and on another tour in Truro Cathedral with the Exon Singers, and a couple of the other motets with the New Cambridge Singers. Since then there’s been an isolated performance of Singet dem Herrn (in Manchester) and Lobet (on an Erleigh Cantors visit to Guildford Cathedral). I’ve had near misses or unsatisfactory performances of others: a Brandon Hill Singers concert including Komm, Jesu, komm with a depleted choir which was about to fold; a Chantry Singers Bachfest concert where I was left out of the lineup; a Bristol Choral Society concert which clashed with a wedding I attended.

This event was well attended, with a number of people coming over from Bristol; in fact it was accidentally promoted by Bath Box Office sending a reminder email to its entire mailing list! It was advertised as being for ‘experienced singers’ although I’m not sure that applied to everyone there. Many of the other singers were people I’d sung with in one choir or another, sometimes not for a few years, which produced interesting conversations and plenty to catch up on. I did find myself frequently having to justify why I now sing in larger choirs, and why I don’t sing much in Bath (my reply to the latter line of enquiry is to ask when was the last Bath performance of the Missa Solemnis, to say nothing of the Glagolitic Mass)*. I think it helped that we were encouraged to wear sticky labels with our names on, so other people could come up and address us personally. Current members of the Paragon Singers apologised for the way I’d been put on a waiting list for auditions for the choir years ago and then never heard anything further – it doesn’t work that way now.

We were given a thorough warmup, then taken through the two motets with careful attention to pronunciation. Speeds were tempered to allow everyone to keep up and there was some light accompaniment to prevent pitch drift. We did the whole of Komm, Jesu, komm and everyone sang the full-choir parts of Jesu, meine Freude, with members of the Paragon Singers supplying the more lightly scored movements. And the usual sing-through at the end.

This wasn’t the first such event the choir had held. Would I go to another one? I think it’s like Bristol Choral Society’s Come and Sings: it would depend on the repertoire; in this case it was particularly appealing.

* 1982 (yes, really) and never (actually the Bristol performance I sang in was the first one there).

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Go to Jail

Posted on February 22, 2023 by vhk10

The branch of the Premier Inn I stayed in at Bury St Edmunds was previously the town gaol, and retained some of the original features (not in my room, I’m happy to say). After not singing last year with the Cathedral Chamber Choir, I rejoined them for a weekend of services at the Cathedral conducted by Chris Pilgrim.

The real west end of the Cathedral and its Lego equivalent. Can you tell which is which?

Despite concerns that the time of year might be uncongenial, we had a large choir and some juggling was required to fit into the choir stalls. Our repertoire was all very familiar music to me. We sang an evensong and a Eucharist at the Cathedral then made way for guitars in the afternoon and went along the road to St Mary’s Church, which would be the most impressive church in many places.

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Bachfest 2023

Posted on February 18, 2023 by vhk10

I didn’t get the the Bath Opera spring production this year – The Merry Widow – as the Thursday night sold out (perhaps because the tickets were cheaper) and that was the only night I could go. So instead we bought separate tickets to hear Angela Hewitt at the Bachfest in St Mary’s Church (though we ended up sitting together after others in the audience had also moved around).

Angela Hewitt and her Fazioli are frequent visitors to Bath, although I’d not heard her play in St Mary’s Church before. Her programme was all Bach – the Well-Tempered Clavier Book II, Nos 5–12, and the Overture in the French Style BWV831. The latter work wasn’t familiar to me – it’s more of a suite than an overture. Needless to say it was all immaculately played – I was particularly impressed by the graduation of her dynamics. There was a large audience, including the usual coachload bussed in for the event.

Musically speaking, the day hadn’t really gone to plan as I’d been supposed to sing another evensong with Bath Abbey Chamber Choir in Wells Cathedral. But this was called off a couple of weeks beforehand because of filming in the Cathedral that day. So much for the special relationship between Bath Abbey and the Cathedral!

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observing the Weelkes anniversary

Posted on February 10, 2023 by vhk10

I foresee a lot of Tudor repertoire this year, with anniversaries both of Byrd and of Weelkes. I observed the latter by singing his ‘First Service’ canticles at Bath Abbey (doing a number of the first treble verse parts) with the Abbey Chamber Choir. I don’t think I’d sung these before, so the familiarity I felt must probably have come from listening to them. There are plenty more Weelkes canticle settings for me to learn this anniversary year; I believe he wrote nine settings in all and the only others I’ve done are his Short Service, the Service ‘for trebles’ and the Magnificat from the 5-voice setting, so that’s five and a half to go.

The rest of the service included music by Bairstow and Parry with the Ayleward Responses. Byrd’s turn will come early in Lent.

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the rise of the carol service

Posted on January 30, 2023 by vhk10

Time was when a carol service meant Christmas carols. (It has a sister in the ‘carol concert’, a format I’ve never really enjoyed because it feels wrong to pay for something that is often very similar to a service.) Advent carol services are now well established, and my church has had both of these in December for many years.

This year I marked four stages in the nativity story with a carol service; as well as Advent, Christmas and Epiphany (see the previous post; this was the odd one out as it was in Bath Abbey) we had one for Candlemas. This last had a Nunc Dimittis and several anthems from our repertoire (including Mathias’ Lift up your heads – another way of repurposing it as the Ascensiontide season is so short).

The format is fairly standard: appropriate music for choir interspersed with hymns, prayers and readings, either biblical or otherwise suited to the season. (Bath Abbey’s Epiphany service last year was rather more experimental but this format clearly lay behind it.)

At least the turn of phrase ‘Help us, for whom Lent is near’ was more appropriate this year. It felt very odd last year when we anticipated Candlemas on the last Sunday in January, and Lent was at that point not until the month after next.

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At last! Tribus Miraculis!

Posted on January 15, 2023 by vhk10

This piece by Marenzio had been on my wishlist for a while, after I’d heard it on numerous broadcasts at Epiphany time. It came round in the Epiphany Carol service at Bath Abbey this year. More florid in style than contemporary pieces by English composers. I thought I’d not sung anything else by him (this seems to be the only sacred piece by him that is much performed), but on checking my records found a couple of other anthems. A good way to start the year, anyway.

Other pieces included Dove’s Seek him that maketh the seven stars (sadly we didn’t get the full effect of this as the Abbey has a toaster temporarily installed), Howells’ Here is the little door, Leighton’s setting of the Coventry Carol, Tchaikovsky’s The Crown of Roses, and a reprise of Elgar’s The Spirit of the Lord which we sang at last year’s ordination. They were interspersed with prayers, Bible readings and hymns (with, unusually for the Abbey, a couple of bloopers where choir and congregation were singing significantly different words from one another!)

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Review of the year: 2022

Posted on December 31, 2022 by vhk10

This was naturally enough a great improvement on the two previous years. My musical life (like my non-musical one) contained many events postponed from 2020 and 2021, and so became very busy.

I’ve only done half a dozen overseas choir tours in my life, but two of them were this year. First, the Gloucester Choral Society excursion to the Veneto, including singing in San Marco, the Frari church in Venice, the basilica of St Antony in Padua and Asola Cathedral. In the autumn came a trip to Hannover with Bristol Choral Society to mark the anniversary of Bristol’s twinning with the city.

Actually the music-related highlight may not have been either of these, but being part of spontaneous singing of the National Anthem at the Oval cricket ground, if only because I can’t imagine being part of anything quite like it again.

Large-scale concerts returned (though not the Bristol Beacon, for which we must wait till December 2023) and the works I performed at them included Fauré’s Requiem (twice), Rutter’s Requiem, Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs (twice), the long-awaited Symphony of Psalms by Stravinsky, Vivaldi’s Gloria and Messiah.

The Bath Abbey Chamber Choir is finding its feet and I have learnt new repertoire (including O Hearken Thou from my wishlist) and did the solo in Britten’s Te Deum in E. I didn’t do much singing with visiting choirs at Cathedrals, although I did go to Lichfield and Gloucester with the Erleigh Cantors. I reacquainted myself with some pieces I had not sung for many years, such as Howells’ Responses, Stainer’s Crucifixion and, at different times, all of Handel’s Coronation Anthems.

Concert-going was now freely possible again, and this included a Prom, Bath Opera, a trip to the Barbican and to hear Welsh National Opera in Cardiff.

2023 promises excitement both in performing and in hearing others do so. I’ll write it up here in due course (along with finishing off writing about 2022).

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Advent/Christmas 2022 (2): four carol services

Posted on December 30, 2022 by vhk10

Three I sang in and one where I was in the congregation.

One new piece for me in the church Advent carol service (held as usual on the second Sunday in Advent): Nova! Nova! by Bob Chilcott, very catchy but you need your wits about you, especially when the rhythms get subtly altered between verses. Later in the month was the Christmas carol service with two more new items: The Owl by Toby Young (where an apparent need to economise on paper led to a lot of to-ing and fro-ing through the copy to navigate the piece) and In the Stillness by Sally Beamish. That wasn’t the last carol service I sang in the choir for though, as we hosted one for the local hospital the following day.

Back in St David’s for the first time since 2019 we went to the 9 Lessons and Carols at the Cathedral, as well as Midnight Mass and the service on Christmas morning. We were rather taken by the Welsh carol beginning Roedd yn y wlad honno sung at the 9 Lessons. There has been a change of Director of Music since we last came, but standards held up well and the tradition of extravagant organ improvisation continues.

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completing the set of Coronation Anthems

Posted on December 15, 2022 by vhk10

The following weekend I had another concert, Bristol Choral Society’s Christmas concert in Bristol Cathedral. A chance to complete the set of Coronation Anthems by Handel, as we did all except The King shall Rejoice, which I sang in May this year. This was something of a memory test for me, as I had not sung two of them since I was a student, in a rather short-lived choir conducted by John Butt. This still put me at an advantage over most in the choir who had not done them at all!

They require a lot of stamina and energy, not just to project the overall bright celebratory mood, but also in the more reflective passages, such as one bar in My heart is inditing which is at a much greater level of difficulty than anything else in the anthems. (Sopranos who’ve sung the anthems will know which bar I’m talking about.)

If they need some singers next May, we know the anthems now and improved on the original performance (if the notes made by the then Archbishop of Canterbury are to be believed: ‘the Anthem in Confusion: All irregular in the Music’).

The other half of the programme was Vivaldi’s Gloria, the subject of our Come and Sing earlier in the autumn. I learn from the programme that it wasn’t published till the 1920s – you tend to assume that such a popular piece now has been known about since at least the mid-nineteenth century when baroque music began to be performed again.

Another concert where it was good to be back with an orchestra (the British Sinfonietta). We had a sizeable audience who were generous with their applause.

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an unheated Messiah

Posted on December 10, 2022 by vhk10

I try to space out performances of Messiah – helped by the pandemic I’d managed to go four years since the last one – and in fact I’d never performed it in Gloucester Cathedral. I rejoined Gloucester Choral Society (having missed their main autumn concert) for their performance, rather expecting the interpretation to be the same as when I’d sung it for the same conductor in Bristol Cathedral. Not the same at all, as there were all sorts of adjustments to take account of the different acoustic and maybe also the slightly smaller choir, or just second thoughts about how it should be done.

A replacement for a broken part in the heating system in the Cathedral was held up in the post, and so we were unheated; rather than sitting in a row on stage, our soloists came and went from a warmer room in the cloisters, just appearing in order to sing. Our orchestra (the Corelli Orchestra) improvised various ways of covering themselves in additional layers. (An appeal: I have a black supima cotton polo-neck top, bought from Lands End I think for a Bath Camerata performance some years ago, which is Gloucesterproof. However, it’s fraying at the cuffs with wear, and although I can conceal this under a jacket or by rolling the cuffs in a certain way, it would be good to get another similar garment. Lands End don’t seem to do plain polos anymore, so any leads on another supplier would be welcome.)

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