Lichfield dedications

Posted on January 2, 2019 by vhk10

For the last few years Lichfield Cathedral Choir have set a themed quiz at Advent and Lent, with a question each day. I have in the past had fun identifying Cathedral choir stalls and music setting the word ‘star’, though I didn’t attempt the organ consoles set in Lent 2018.

Advent 2018 was more tempting; enciphered dedications of pieces sung by Lichfield Cathedral Choir during the year. I wasn’t one of the top scorers, but there were only 3 of the 24 I couldn’t do, and a fourth I solved outside the 24-hour window. I was able to identify every piece for which I deciphered the coded dedication. I took pride in submitting solutions as soon as possible after the questions were released at midnight each day, which kept me up some nights, though never really late! I did the decipherments by various methods: identifying the cipher, looking for the most commonly occurring symbols and matching them to common letters, using dates (where these appeared unenciphered), or trying to find common words such as ‘commissioned’ or ‘dedicated’ and formulaic phrases (a method which has been fruitful in expanding our understanding of Etruscan).

This set me thinking about dedications in general. At least for anthems and service music, they only appear from the end of the 19th century onwards, perhaps because before then people just composed music as it was needed rather than being commissioned. The prevalence of commissions, and the consequent need to be serious, may also be why no one in music seems to have gone in systematically for the sly humour of Nikolaus Pevsner in this area. (Although David Willcocks has had a go: see below). However I have a few favourites, generally those where the dedicator has taken the opportunity to put the dedicatee’s name in virtual lights for a reason other than that they paid for the piece to be written. (And while I am a devotee of a composer who turned dedications into a minor art form, I shall leave Berg out of this post.) I have mentioned before Kodály’s UXORI CARISSIMAE on his Missa Brevis, getting the message out in a way that it would not have been had he written it in Hungarian. Another is Debussy’s gently punning one for his Ariettes oubliées to Mary Garden “inoubliable Mélisande”, so that his opinion of her creation of the title rôle in his opera would forever be on the record. I may add some more to the list as they occur to me. (Here’s one.)

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Review of the year: 2018

Posted on December 31, 2018 by vhk10

I don’t think that this was a particularly vintage year, though there was one obvious highlight: singing in Mahler 8 at the Proms. For public exposure that is hard to beat! If there was a theme to the year, it was that it largely reprised Three Choirs 2016, as I got to sing again four of the six pieces I performed then. I sang in Clifton Cathedral for the first time. I made the acquaintance of Will Todd’s Mass in Blue at a Come and Sing, and at last performed Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music. From the Cathedral repertoire it was Purcell in B flat, Bach’s O Jesu Christ mein Lebens Licht and Weelkes’ Service for Trebles, amongst other pieces, that were new to me. I sang Duruflé’s Requiem with organ in Portugal, and with orchestra in Keynsham. I’ve also spent more time than I’d have liked bobbing about to try to get a view of the conductor.

Most of the performances I went to were local, either in Festivals or by local amateur groups, although I heard an organ recital at the Proms and another in the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona.

And now for some awards:

Performance of the Year. Mahler 8 with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in the Royal Albert Hall (see above)

Building of the Year. Winchester Cathedral, where I sang both with the Cathedral Chamber Choir in August and with the Erleigh Cantors in October. I also went to a concert in Prior Park Chapel for the first time. And saw in Barcelona just what can be done with a concert hall when the choir is put at the heart of the design.

Repeated pieces. Nothing really spectacular, but there was Duruflé’s Requiem in its various guises, and at one point I kept encountering Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte.

Mistaken Identity award. Being thought to be French when I sang the Alleluias at a Catalan-language Mass.

Obstructive Fellow Singer Award. The winner of this may well turn out to be the all-time winner. Not content with usurping a place which had been carefully and clearly reserved for a soprano, he took it on himself in rehearsal to relay the conductor’s beat and gestures for the benefit of those of us who couldn’t see that far, and for good measure repeatedly gesticulated upwards if pitch dropped and shushed anyone he thought was singing too loudly. As I couldn’t face an evening next to someone who found fault with my singing every time I opened my mouth – that’s the conductor’s job! – I moved elsewhere for the performance.

Obstructive Fellow Singer Award: runners-up. The trio of sopranos (all from the same choir) at a Come and Sing (not one of Bristol Choral’s!) who decided to monopolise the solos, because of course no one else could possibly attempt any of them. I persisted in singing along with those parts I thought I could do competently – including some passages that their ‘lead’ singer kept getting wrong – so the soprano solo line was always a trio or quartet. It would have been better to divide them between us four (and indeed anyone else who wanted a go), as the altos, tenors and basses managed to do, so that it didn’t turn into a semi-chorus.

What does 2019 hold? I think it might be a year of change in some respects. We are looking forward to having an enhanced organ and new choir stalls in church, but there isn’t a definite timescale for either yet. That is something I’m really looking forward to. There are some pieces new to me turning up in concert, a first visit to Christchurch Priory and the Erleigh Cantors go further north than ever before! And I am going to try and put some more images – at least one a month? – into the blog.

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keeping that candle going

Posted on December 31, 2018 by vhk10

Back in St David’s for Christmas again, and this time we arrived at the Cathedral for 9 Lessons and Carols soon after the doors opened and were able to sit at the back of the nave (next to someone who had apparently been parked there by some fitter companions who sat elsewhere).

I’m happy to report no electrical mishaps interfering noisily this year, although at this and other services I noticed that the heaters near the crossing still intermittently hum noisily. I didn’t fare quite so well with the candle because of a draught from the direction of the West door, so it only lasted till the Seventh Lesson. I thought I’d be all right in the dark with the remaining hymns (all in English), but got slightly floored by one of the less frequently sung verses of O Come All Ye Faithful: ‘Child, for us strangers/Poor and in the manger,/erm er umm umm….’

What of the choir? Along with some standards we had some pieces with Welsh connexions such as a setting of a translation of Es ist ein Ros’ by Meirion Wynn Jones and George Guest’s beautiful arrangement of Suo Gân. I’m sure the Guest would be better known if choirs could get over the language barrier (it wouldn’t be the same in English).

The extravagant improvisations this year took some of their material from L’Arlésienne, or to be precise from the Provençal carol La marche des rois used by Bizet. St David’s clearly sticks to the same Mass settings for the Christmas services each year.

Meanwhile earlier in December we’d included two ambitious pieces in our own Advent carol service: Anthony Piccolo’s I look from afar and I am the day by Jonathan Dove (he likes setting texts about stars!). And I sang one of the O antiphons – gradually working my way round them all.

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my Clifton Cathedral début

Posted on December 29, 2018 by vhk10

I could have performed in Clifton Cathedral on a number of occasions – for example, if I’d joined the Bath Festival Chorus – but have never actually done so. The Cathedral doesn’t host many concerts, and I believe that Bristol Choral Society’s Messiah was the first performance of the piece there this millennium. (I am, as always, happy to be corrected if I get my facts wrong.)

It is a building uncompromisingly of its time – not for nothing did it win a Concrete Society Award in 1974 – and a large choir has to make room for the altar, so there is a very large distance between the front and the back. Also a ‘naughty step’ for the second row to sit on, rather than chairs. I did not find the resonant acoustic misleading, but it probably helped that I was in the front row.

We had a gratifyingly capacity audience on what was a very busy night for choral concerts in Bristol, and after another performance of Messiah nearby three days earlier. I enjoyed returning to the work after two years, but don’t regret not having sung it last year (about every three years is right for me, I think). Our performance got a five-star review in the Bristol Post.

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Organathon!

Posted on December 12, 2018 by vhk10

Today my church is running an ambitious sponsored event: our organist Keith Pigot has come up with 12 hours of repertoire and is playing from 7am-7pm in aid of the repair and restoration of our organ. I went over to hear him fairly soon after the start and he was going strong; I’ll return at lunchtime to check on him and give out mulled wine and mince pies to those who’ve come to hear him.

I’m happy to report he reached the £2000 target at about 10 this morning but all further support is welcome: donate at Organathon. Or of course come along to the church in person today and hear the performance! organathon

We would really like to make our organ into a proper recital instrument and not just repair recent damage from falling plaster.

I once organised a similar event in aid of RAG at university: 12 hours of hymn singing. But it wasn’t all done by just one person!

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a memorial and a Requiem

Posted on December 8, 2018 by vhk10

17th November turned out to be a busy day musically. In the morning I was in the choir for a memorial service for the parents(-in-law) of two members of my church choir, in the small parish church in Winsley. I appreciated the generous catering at the lunch afterwards, as I then had to hot-wheel it over for the Keynsham Orchestra and Chew Valley Choral Society’s performance of Duruflé’s Requiem in the parish church there.

I had two reasons for jumping at the chance to sing in this concert (which came via Bristol Choral Society). Firstly, these concerts have the enjoyable feel of a community event, which you don’t get even in Bath and certainly not in Bristol. I know one or two in the orchestra and you can purchase more generous catering in the shape of home-made cake in the interval. Secondly, although I have sung Duruflé’s Requiem countless times, I have only once before done it with full orchestra, in an All Souls’ Day Mass at St Mary Magdalene, Paddington. It is a very different animal from the more austere organ accompaniment one usually gets, with much extra colour and counter-melodies which are not to be found in the other version.

I was in the audience for the first part of the concert, Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, which I was hearing for the second time that week, and the suite from the ‘Firebird’. Our soloists in the Requiem were Angharad Watkeys and Niall Hoskin and the conductor was Mark Gateshill. I was behind the horns which was not as deafening as you might think and gave me a chance to appreciate some of the counter-melodies mentioned above, for example near the beginning of the Libera me. Our performance was warmly received by a good-sized audience.

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Bath Mozartfest (3) – Sitkovetskys and Tallis Scholars

Posted on December 2, 2018 by vhk10

My husband went to hear the regular Festival visitors, the Sitkovetsky Trio, give a lunchtime recital at the Guildhall. They were not quite on their best form. Haydn’s ‘Gypsy Rondo’ trio worked well but Schubert’s D929 trio is rambling and they didn’t really find an inventive solution to this.

I was lucky to get a ticket to the Tallis Scholars’ concert in St Mary’s Bathwick as there was just one left in the =main aisle. I last heard them in Merton College Chapel in a fundraising concert. The programme ‘The Path to Purcell’ didn’t pretend to connect to Mozart and I wondered whether it might be linked to a forthcoming recording? I’m not complaining as it’s one of my favourite areas of repertoire.

Most of the music was pieces I’ve sung and in a number of cases am very familiar with. We got both Tomkins’ and Purcell’s settings of My Beloved Spake and O Sing unto the Lord. I have sung many performances of Tomkins’ canticles and of course the Responses, but only isolated ones of his anthems, which don’t seem to have found a very firm niche in the repertoire. Other composers represented were Gibbons and Pelham Humfrey.

The Purcell component was very much a selection of the ‘greatest hits’ among his anthems. I noticed that they went for the unusual variant of Eb and Db at the end of bar 63 in the alto part of Jehovah, quam multi sunt hostes mei. This imprinted on me because I discovered the anthem via a broadcast from Salisbury Cathedral which used it, but I’d never heard it since then until now! Now when am I ever going to sing My beloved spake?

Different singers were used in the different pieces, moving so nimbly around between them (they must be very practised at this) that one barely noticed. The performances were as polished as you’d expect from this group, with timbres of the individual voices distinguishable, yet blending with one another. Accompaniment was provided where necessary by James McVinnie on an imported chamber organ (not the Willis on Old Philharmonic pitch which lives in the church!) There were many I knew in the audience and the mood was set by lighting our seating with candles.

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Bath Mozartfest 2018 (2) – Angela Hewitt

Posted on November 27, 2018 by vhk10

We went to the Assembly Rooms on the Sunday night to hear Angela Hewitt, a regular visitor. She began with Mozart’s C minor sonata, which didn’t always seem totally secure. Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata was more settled and played with complete assurance. During this piece I felt the tuning of the Fazioli piano was coming slightly adrift, and sure enough the tuner appeared in the interval and was at work for some time.

The second half began with another Mozart sonata, K576 in D major, again one that was’t written primary as an exercise for his pupils. The final piece was a performance of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin that alternated between the virtuosic and the reflective. I used to play some of this (not the final movement!) and still have a score. I’d heard the orchestral version on Radio 3 a few days previously which was a useful comparison, although there are two extra movements in the piano original. As with Hewitt’s interpretation of Liszt’s Sonata a few years ago, it was clear that she enjoys more recent pieces that reference the baroque. We were told this had not been programmed with the Armistice anniversary in mind, but it was obviously appropriate to it. The encore was the same composer’s Pavane pour une infante défunte.

We’d observed the centenary of the Armistice earlier at church, appending half an hour of readings and music to our usual service. So it was a six-anthem morning, perhaps the most notable inclusion being the addition of the Russian Kontakion to our current repertoire.

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Bath Mozartfest 2018 (1) – the Nash Ensemble

Posted on November 18, 2018 by vhk10

This year’s Mozartfest boasted a particularly appealing programme with stellar performers, and it was possible to come by tickets for all the concerts we wanted to go to – maybe a consequence of austerity? I made a point of going to the first Saturday morning concert in the Assembly Rooms, with the festival regulars, the Nash Ensemble, who brought along with them the likes of Michael Collins and Adrian Brendel.

Mozart’s string quintet K593 had a formal sophistication which marked it out as a late work and in some sense the most mature work on the programme. Weber’s Clarinet Quintet in B flat was essentially a showcase for the clarinettist (Michael Collins) – a concerto with the orchestra replaced by a string quartet. They had an accompanying role and you never really got to hear them pass material around themselves or have a solo line as individuals. Once you accepted that, it was an enjoyable piece with a virtuoso clarinet line played with ease.

Beethoven made various youthful excursions into multi-instrument chamber music, and in the early days of this blog I wrote about the Nash Ensemble playing one of the less successful ones. By the time he wrote the Septet he’d solved the problems of balancing the instruments, and after the Weber I was carefully checking that everyone had their moment of glory. They did – a set of variations gave good opportunities for this – and even the double-bass player came through in some of the lighter scored passages. The work has the multi-movement form of a serenade, and as far as I can tell is the earliest septet to have made a mark on musical history, with quite a few later composers taking up the challenge.

The concert was well attended, but I saw very few of school age, which is a shame when the timing was friendly to young people. I still think about the chandeliers in the Assembly Rooms, but having watched some of the world gymnastics championships recently, I now imagine the sort of routine a top gymnast might construct around them.

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rejoining a couple of former choirs

Posted on November 13, 2018 by vhk10

I did a bit of moonlighting at a couple of churches I used to sing in. First came a service for All Souls’ Day in Bathwick. We were in the side aisle, but this time for the good reason that new underfloor heating is going in the nave. The choir contained some of those who used to sing at the church with others from the other church in the benefice. Our conductor had an admirably gung-ho attitude when people appeared not to be watching during the rehearsal – pulling around the tempo to see who followed him and who didn’t!

At the weekend I was over in Cambridge and sang for the first time in a few years for an ordinary Mass (i.e. not a Requiem) at Little St Mary’s. In fact it was the Feast of Dedication, which meant an overlap with one of the hymns we had at our wedding in this church. The choir is quite a lot larger than it used to be (it helps that there is no longer an annual turnover of choirmasters, as there was when I lived in Cambridge) and has junior choristers in alternate weeks. Another difference is that the singing of plainchant is more nuanced; rather than singing the same psalm tones in the same way to the proper texts each week, there is some of the plainchant appropriate to that day in the liturgy, with expression marks of various kinds. As I’m not a plainchant expert, I let others take the lead in this.

I finished my weekend in Cambridge by going to King’s College Chapel for Sunday evensong, where I heard the eponymous canticles by Howells and Let all the world by Vaughan Williams.

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The Serenade to Music

Posted on November 12, 2018 by vhk10

Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music has been another piece on my wishlist. A while back there was a proposal to perform it in Bath with me and 15 other singers, but it didn’t happen. It can be done also with a choir and four soloists, but Bristol Choral Society did it in Bristol Cathedral in the fully choral version; there’s no change in the score, so one minute you are doing a rather undemanding part for massed voices and the next you are pretending to be Eva Turner or Isobel Baillie. We used a reduced orchestration for strings and piano. I shall understand this piece better next time I hear it in a concert.

The other Vaughan Williams in the concert was Dona Nobis Pacem, written slightly earlier, which is getting a lot of performances in the WWI centenary period, including the one I sang at 3 Choirs a couple of years ago. This too was given in an arrangement for strings and piano, so you had to imagine the brass in the second movement. On the other hand this performance had more expressive flexibility with regard to tempo. I suspect this piece will withdraw from concert programmes again once the centenary is past, but perhaps it might be time to look at RVW’s other cantatas, Sancta Civitas and Hodie – both are just names to me. [I’ve since done Sancta Civitas and found out why it is rarely performed – not want of musical quality.]

Our programme was completed with Howells’ Elegy and Farewell to Arms by Finzi. This last is not exactly a song cycle, just two thematically related poems set for tenor and strings. I thought I knew Finzi’s music quite well, but I was unaware of it. It was an inspired complement to the other pieces.

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Weelkes in Winchester

Posted on November 12, 2018 by vhk10

It was a quick return to Winchester, this time with the Erleigh Cantors. Slightly worryingly, the place where we rehearsed in the summer was off-limits because of dodgy electrics, so we were displaced to Pilgrims’ Hall, an impressively old but rather chilly wood-framed hall now used as a school theatre. We were relieved that this autumn was mild and we did not get as cold there as we were in Ely a few years ago.

On Saturday we did a setting which was on my personal wishlist, Weelkes ‘for trebles’. There’s a reason why I’ve had to wait so long for this one: the first treble/soprano line in the full sections is relentlessly high. It is in fact a reconstruction by Peter Le Huray (once known to me slightly and rather better known to my husband), based on the organ part; were he alive today I’d take him up on whether it was seriously meant to be like that! Although the Gloria of the Nunc draws on his anthem Alleluia, I heard a voice, or is it the other way round? Either way I suspect the music got re-used because he got back from the pub and realised that he hadn’t finished composing a piece that was needed imminently.

We had further demanding singing ahead on the Sunday. Vaughan Williams’ Te Deum in G is familiar to me; I seem to be doing a lot of his music at the moment (see the next article). Our Communion setting was the Mass Congratulamini mihi by Guerrero (whose music I sang last time I was in Winchester); it is expansive and not easy to sing across the wide space between the two halves of the choir in the Cathedral crossing.

In the afternoon our canticles were another set I’d heard but never performed; the Hereford service by Richard Lloyd, written in 1982. They require quite a bit of agility and have some unexpected key changes, with more than a nod to Howells. I hadn’t realised till I looked at his Wikipedia page how prolific a composer Richard Lloyd is; positively in the Darius Milhaud league, though I suppose most of his works are short. Our anthem was Let all the world by Leighton, to use up any voice we had left. For the record, we also performed Leighton’s Responses, Sing joyfully by Byrd, They that go down by Sumsion and Justorum animae by Lassus.

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