Last Saturday I joined the Chandos Singers again for a programme of French (composer or language) secular music (nice to have a concert in December that isn’t taken over by Christmas). I’d never sung any of it before.<\/p>\n
I say ‘secular’ despite several pieces having sacred texts. Probably the most sincerely religious setting in the evening was the two chunks of Poulenc’s Stabat Mater<\/i> that he set before the rest. A mediæval motet about Balaam suddently turned into a skit about speakers of English. Moulinié’s motet Congratulamini mihi omnes<\/i> can be adapted for any saint’s day – provided the saint’s name doesn’t contain too many syllables – but the exclamations O amor! O voluptas!<\/i> in the middle suggested that the author of the text had other things on his mind. As for Saint-Saëns’ Le Déluge<\/i>, the sins of antedeluvian humanity and their gruesome punishment were dwelt on at such length that I wonder whether the author really hoped that contemporary Parisians might meet the same fate.<\/p>\n
I had a part in a section for quartet (though six of us performed it) in Le Déluge<\/i>. It’s the sort of piece that it’s impossible not to ham up a bit, and is one of those compositions whose premiere was disrupted by members of the audience objecting to the amount of dissonance it contained. Hasn’t really changed my attitude to Saint-Saëns though.<\/p>\n
We also did among other things Lauridsen’s Chansons des Roses<\/i>, in which my main difficulty was that the soprano line often lay very low. The fourth setting is so similar in its harmonic progressions to his O Magnum Mysterium<\/i> that I’m not sure that with a bit of transposition the two pieces couldn’t happily be performed simultaneously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last Saturday I joined the Chandos Singers again for a programme of French (composer or language) secular music (nice to have a concert in December that isn’t taken over by Christmas). I’d never sung any of it before. I say … Continue reading