a rub from Pangur

Posted on November 11, 2017 by vhk10

This autumn seems relatively empty musically. I think this is partly in comparison with last autumn which was exceptionally busy, with three concerts over and above what I’d usually do. By contrast, this year there is one event fewer, because of a clash of dates, and this comes after missing the Cathedral Chamber Choir’s trip to Lincoln in August.

After 10 years (the last visit was just before the new song room opened) the Erleigh Cantors came back to Wells, for my second weekend of the year in the Cathedral. While rehearsing in the Nave choir stalls I got a friendly rub round the legs from Pangur the cat (I think it was he rather than Louis) and it was lovely to see David, my former College Chaplain.

We brought quite a lot of pieces which were new to me. No early music this time (giving it a rest after all the Josquin at St David’s). Our Eucharist setting was Howard Goodall’s Missa Aedis Christi. The recording of this is misleading, as the Mass was revised afterwards, possibly to make it shorter (although it’s still pretty expansive).

Our Sunday evening anthem was Richard Shephard’s And when the builders, written for the Friends of Salisbury Cathedral – hence perhaps the text The silver is thine and the gold is thine for this fund-raising group! A lot of time-signature changes and apparently awkward leads which fell into place with the organ accompaniment.

There were also a couple of pieces I’d only done once before. I have rather unhappy memories of Vaughan Williams’ O vos omnes because the only other time I’ve ever sung it, it went very flat almost at once and then I couldn’t pitch my notes. This performance had no such problems. The piece seems to be (undeservedly) very little known; it’s not listed in the Wikipedia list of VW’s works.

I do enjoy Walton’s Jubilate, which we sang at Matins (I was the middle of the 3 upper-voice verse parts). A further challenge was Anthony Piccolo’s Responses, a tricky setting which I hadn’t sung for a few years. We also fitted in music by Rutter, Sumsion, Elgar (The Spirit of the Lord), Naylor and Dyson!

After Saturday evening, I dashed over to Bristol to hear Bristol Choral Society’s concert, but that must wait for the next post.

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Constructivism but no umbrellas

Posted on October 25, 2017 by vhk10

Suddenly realising that we were on the point of missing WNO’s Khovanshchina performances altogether, we grabbed tickets, leapt in the car and drove off to Cardiff to see it (as often with more ambitious repertoire, it wasn’t coming to Bristol).

Was any operatic character so much on a hiding to nothing as Marfa? She is clearly getting nowhere with Andrei Khovansky, threatened with death by Golitsyn (though I thought they might have made quite a good couple) and derided by other Old Believers, whom she joins just in time for them all to commit mass suicide. Her real function seems to be to hold together the various parts of a very diffuse plot. In this thankless role we had the spirited Sara Fulgoni. Mark le Brocq, with whom I used to sing in Cambridge choirs played Golitsyn (why is it he always seems to play plonkers?). The orchestra thrillingly brought to life Shostakovich’s completion of the score, conducted by Tomáš Hanus.

The sets had a vaguely Soviet look, (Golitsyn was carried off into exile in a frame which had previously held a Constructivist-looking painting) and despite being Pountney I saw no umbrellas. The whole stage ended up being rather cluttered, with characters having to dodge bric-a-brac left over from earlier scenes. In the final scene the funeral pyres resembled nothing so much as those outdoor heaters you get in pub gardens, though to be fair, I don’t think those were commonplace when this production was new. There was the usual (for WNO) superb use of lighting. And they no longer seem to have problems now disposing the chorus around the stage.

It is a confusing opera if you aren’t familiar with that bit of Russian history, and possibly if you are. Probably no production can really solve all its problems, but we are glad that we went to this one.

Reviews:

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Gloomy Mahler (2) – Kindertotenlieder

Posted on October 13, 2017 by vhk10

The Bath Philharmonia and Jason Thornton brought Mahler back to St Swithin’s Church. For the conductor, Jason Thornton, this marked the point at which he had conducted all of Mahler’s orchestral works

We had Mahler’s orchestration for strings of the first movement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet. It’s hard to see quite what Mahler had to add or rearrange, apart from finding something for the double basses to do (they doubled the cellos from time to time and added reinforcing pizzicatos).

This was followed by a sensitive performance of Kindertotenlieder (in the chamber arrangement by Rainer Riehn) given by Gavin Carr. In the orchestra, I was particularly impressed by the woodwind playing. The second half Gavin was joined by Gemma Roper as soloists in Fauré’s Requiem with Cantilena (the local authority youth choir). A good preparation for my singing the piece myself in November; it was hard to imagine that the choir rarely sang with an orchestra.

The concert was well attended (a good audience of parents etc. is more or less guaranteed when you have a lot of young people performing). I sat in the side gallery, where the sideways view of the performers is blocked by pillars; one member of the audience stood up throughout in order to see them. Not for the first time, I wondered why the audience couldn’t use the West part of the gallery, which has no such impeded view. In fact some relatives of one of the soloists were seated there, so what was the reason for excluding others in the audience? I also reflected rather sadly on the absence of an organ in this church – you can see the space where it used to be.

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Gloomy Mahler (1): Prom 72

Posted on October 1, 2017 by vhk10

I happened to have a ticket to London on the day the Vienna Philharmonic under Daniel Harding were performing Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Just that – the need to fit a 2-hour concert later in the evening meant that even with a 6.30 start there was no time for a curtain-raiser such as a Mozart or Haydn symphony, a piece of Second Viennese School, or Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which I feel is the subtext to Mahler’s Sixth – I seemed to hear fragments of it all over the place.

I was impressed by much of the playing, though mainly by wind and brass rather than the strings that this orchestra is famous for. While I’m used to orchestras playing behind their conductor’s beat, the time lag here was unusually large, and there were moments of ragged ensemble.

I’m probably not the person to ask about the merits of the interpretation, as I’m not really a Mahlerian. The slow movement came second, which is the order I favour as it then separates two faster, urgent movements. Though as tempi were on the steady side, they could have got away with the other order too. I was carried along without feeling overwhelmed, which probably makes it a failure on the Mahler ratings scale. But at least I have now heard the VPO live.

I went to another performance some years back though don’t remember enough now to compare the two.

Reviews:

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the season begins

Posted on September 12, 2017 by vhk10

I don’t normally have much of a ‘close season’ for singing. Erleigh Cantors at the end of July are followed by Cathedral Chamber Choir towards the end of August, and then church choir and Bristol Choral resume in the first week of September. But this year there has felt like a gap, of nearly a month after the Prom. During that time I spent 2 weeks in the USA which didn’t really yield any suitable material for this blog, and I didn’t join the Cathedral Chamber Choir in Lincoln. Perhaps also the Prom was a very definite end to the season as it was the last BBC National Orchestra of Wales Prom too.

The season began with Christ Church Bath on tour, something we only do occasionally. We were singing Evensong in the Stogumber Festival, in a village now ministered to by one of our former assistant clergy as part of a benefice lying largely on the West Somerset Railway. Shades of the Exultate Singers in Dunkerton as we delved into a remote corner of the county down some almost impossible roads. It would have been nice to have seen the village in better weather. We sang Stanford in B flat and Howells’ Hymn to St Cecilia to a decent-sized and appreciative congregation.

The season starts rather quietly as I’m not singing in the next Bristol Choral Society concert, but it continues with another visit to Wells (my third sing there of the year), followed by Mahler 2 (a first for me) and another first at Christmas: Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols which I’ve somehow managed to miss singing until now. But that’s some way off.

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my Proms début

Posted on August 16, 2017 by vhk10

I don’t take occasions like this for granted. After many years of going to Promenade concerts I was finally on the other side of the stage in the choir stalls as an ‘extra’ with the BBC National Chorus of Wales.

The backstage areas at the RAH are well equipped, with a comfortable common room/bar for the performers, and the staff I encountered were cheerful and helpful. So it didn’t matter too much that the awful weather confined me to the hall between rehearsal and concert. When I was actually in the hall I had a pleasant surprise. I had thought that having the organ in the middle of the stalls would cause the choir to fragment, but I could hear my alto and bass colleagues on the other side of it quite clearly.

As often, I had a good view of the extensive percussion section, which had some unusual instruments including a set of crotales (I had to look the name up), several cowbells and something which looked like a clothespeg (actually it may really have been one, used for holding music to a stand). They were mostly used for Brian Elias’ cello concerto. I’m afraid I can’t give much of an account of this as the soloist Leonard Elschenbroich was facing away from me and not very audible. It wasn’t the flashy-show off kind of concerto.

Somewhere in that percussion section was a whip which was used in the Britten, but I was too busy to notice exactly where. Hearing Ballad of Heroes with the orchestra demonstrated how much of the central part could have been written by Shostakovich, right down to the xylophone entry at the reprise. As often with Britten, I felt the undemonstrative music, when the chorus entered in Part III, was the most effective.

Reading the reviews you’d feel that Elgar’s arrangement of Purcell’s Jehova quam multi sunt hostes mei was a bit unloved. And yet it’s very hard completely to mess up a baroque piece with an inappropriate arrangement, especially when it’s made by a great composer. While Elgar’s setting of ‘Respondet mihi’ didn’t work for me, and ending that section quietly missed a chance for a contrast with the unaccompanied one which follows, I rather liked what he did with the bass solo.

I last heard the Enigma Variations a year ago, conducted by our chorusmaster for this performance. I enjoyed Ryan Wigglesworth’s performance, which took time to savour some of the slower movements without wallowing too much.

As you’d expect from a Prom, there are lots of reviews, though it almost seems as if some of the reviewers had been at different performances from one another. But some sites which reviewed every other Prom didn’t review ours. I can only think the reviewers were deterred by the rain.

Singing at a Promenade concert was probably top of my bucket list of things to do relating to music. I’m not sure what has replaced it; possibly singing a Choral Evensong broadcast (or the broadcast in that slot). Although I’ve sung with at least three choirs that have done one of those broadcasts, there isn’t at the moment an obvious way I’ll get to do this.

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#purcelgar

Posted on August 5, 2017 by vhk10

Acknowledgement to Dave Alkan for the hashtag, too good not to take over. When I get to sing in the Prom on Wednesday I expect I’ll want to write about the experience rather than the repertoire, so here are some thoughts now.

JQM (as I believe it’s known in the trade) has long been one of my favourite anthems so I have a supply of scores and recordings to compare. I first discovered it while going by train from Shrewsbury to Swansea, so after doing it in Elgar’s arrangement with the BBC National Chorus of Wales it’s likely to be permanently associated with that country.

It’s a bit of a mystery piece in some ways. Why did Purcell set Latin? It’s not a very obvious liturgical text, and in fact this particular translation of Ps 3 is not attested elsewhere, which brings its own problems. Somewhere along the line the word maxillam became maxilliam, and Purcell sets the incorrect word to a rather jaunty dotted rhythm, in a ‘fantasia on one note’ passage for the bass soloist. (It’s easy to see palaeographically how the error would have crept in – an extra vertical line got added after the three in ‘-ill-‘ to make ‘-illi-‘.) Elgar (and some others) restore the Latin text at the cost of the rhythm.

Looking at different scores and recordings, it is interesting to look at how fashions have come and gone. Nowadays the anthem does not usually end with a tierce de Picardie (nor does it in Elgar’s version). And there must have been an edition which flattened two alto notes on the word ‘sustentat’; the recording of Salisbury Cathedral which introduced me to Jehova does this, but no others.

Ballad of Heroes recalls various other pieces by Britten – most directly the War Requiem but also Rejoice in the Lamb (lots of chanting on middle C) and perhaps more surprisingly A Ceremony of Carols, written shortly afterwards. Because I did Ceremony for O-level Music and so know it very well, I tend to use it as a yardstick for everything else by Britten. In this case the stretto in the middle section of the Ballad reminds me of that in This little Babe. Ballad of Heroes must be the only piece of classical music to mention ceramic flying ducks, which are surely what the ‘beautiful birds on the wall’ are. (Auden couldn’t resist a dig at the aspirational middle class.) They went on the market around the time the poem Britten sets was written.

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Bax and Josquin in St Davids

Posted on August 4, 2017 by vhk10

The Erleigh Cantors started out doing day-trips from Reading but have gradually ventured further afield. St David’s was definitely the furthest we’d been, though there are rumours that the choir’s next step might be to conquer the North. And then the next stop will be St Magnus’ Cathedral.

So this weekend had the feel of a short choir tour, as we were staying nearby and kept bumping into one another around the little city when we weren’t singing. Most of us fitted in some time on the coastal path or paddling in Whitesands Bay.

Musically we extended our temporal range too, going back to Josquin’s Pange Lingua Mass, most of which we performed (apart from the Creed) on Sunday morning at the Cathedral’s monthly Choral Eucharist. The long and apparently maeandering phrases took a little getting used to, and the writing could be very exposed, especially when only one half of the choir was singing a particular section. But when it came to the performance I felt secure, because the almost unchanging tonality (Carl Orff could have learnt a thing or two from this guy about how to write choral music without changing key) left me free to concentrate on the rhythms.

The other major novelty was Bax’ evening canticles in G. The Magnificat is textually odd since it is the Authorised Version text not the BCP’s, and lacks a Gloria (and indeed an Amen, unlike Finzi’s). The notes needed a lot of work: phrases that were tricky in themselves and then were repeated in a subtly different form, along with numerous changes of tempo. There’s a big theme to latch on to, in the style of Dyson or Wood, and then suddenly you are into characteristically slithery harmonies. The Nunc, written separately is a little more conventional, with a unison minor 9th for interest. I am not a Bax fan in general but after working on them a lot these canticles did grow on me.

On Saturday we sang Blair in B minor, which I’ve done a few times before. Hugh Blair is a bit of a mystery; he was organist of Worcester Cathedral for a couple of years when he was in his thirties, and then disappears for the remaining 30-odd years of his life. None of his other compositions seem to have made it outside Worcester Cathedral, which on the evidence of these canticles is a bit of a shame, or maybe he only had one good piece in him.

There were other pieces which were new to me: Rutter’s Praise the Lord O my Soul (we are gradually working our way through Psalmfest), Gabriel Jackson’s Holy is the True Light (don’t try to sing the central section in 6/8!) and Guerrero’s Ave virgo sanctissima which gave the second sopranos the easy task of following the firsts in canon.

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Durham ups its game

Posted on August 3, 2017 by vhk10

On the Friday night of our visit to St David’s, many of the Erleigh Cantors went to hear the choir of University College, Durham give a recital of ’20th and 21st century music’ in the Cathedral. I was rather expecting this to be some of the anthems they’d sung while in residence at the Cathedral, but it did not overlap with their service music and was considerably ambitious; an almost wholly unaccompanied programme including Howells’ Requiem and MacMillan’s Christus vincit, amongst other things. It was all expertly performed, and I believe the choir has recently recorded several of the pieces.

One of us was a former member of this choir (quite a few years ago) and inevitably we compared this with the choirs of our own student days. It would seem that as in Cambridge and (even more) Oxford, the calibre of College choirs has also gone up significantly in Durham – a sign that music is belatedly recognised as a worthwhile achievement on a par with sport? I would suggest that the expertise of available women has gone up because there are now potentially former girl choristers to choose from, but the men were just as good.

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I sell my soul to a Prom

Posted on July 15, 2017 by vhk10

I have a long-standing ambition to sing at a Promenade concert, and one of the things that attracted me to Bristol Choral Society was the occasional involvement of its members in these concerts (most recently in 2016 and before that 2012). Last year’s (A Child of Our Time) wouldn’t have been practical to do along with 3 Choirs. This time round the offer was to join the BBC National Chorus of Wales to sing 20 minutes or so of music, if one could make 7 rehearsals in Cardiff (the number of rehearsals has since been reduced). I wasn’t so keen – but then I thought that I could make the dates and the opportunity might not come again, so I took the bait.

So what are the pieces we are doing?

I would say that Purcell is this country’s greatest composer, though I would not argue with someone who said it was Elgar (and I probably wouldn’t argue with someone who said it was Vaughan Williams). I would argue with someone who said it was Britten, about whose music I have rather mixed feelings (note: mixed, not totally against). In this concert, we get Britten, and Purcell arranged by Elgar.

When I tell people we are going to do Britten’s Ballad of Heroes, they usually say they’ve never heard of it. I knew it only as a name on the list of choral works on the back of editions of Britten’s scores. It is a propaganda piece, though oddly not pacifist, as it celebrates the sacrifice of those who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. I divide Britten’s choral works into the difficult and the rather less difficult, with (for example) Sacred & Profane and Hymn to St Cecilia in the former category and Rejoice in the Lamb and Ceremony of Carols in the latter, where I’d also put Ballad of Heroes. I’d guess that it was tailored to the abilities of the choir at the festival of ‘Music for the People’ for which it was written. Elgar’s arrangement of Purcell’s Jehova, quam multi sunt hostes mei is a favourite anthem in a different setting from the one I am familiar with.

It’s Prom 32 on August 9th.

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sung once before, long ago (3): the Chichester Psalms

Posted on June 29, 2017 by vhk10

Bristol Choral Society’s final concert of the season was a programme performed to a large audience in Bristol Cathedral.

I didn’t know Eric Whitacre’s Five Hebrew Love Songs, an early work originally written as solo songs for his future wife, who wrote the words. They include such novelties as a bit of aleatoric writing and a setting of the word ‘centimetres’. They are getting a place in the repertoire, not least because of being programmed as in our concert, alongside Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. I sang these once before with Bath Camerata for their 20th anniversary concert, but that was on little rehearsal and the words in particular had fallen from my mind. On the evidence of these pieces, modern Hebrew comes over as more euphonious than its Biblical counterpart. In between, our Choral Scholars performed Whitacre’s Sainte-Chapelle, which integrates plainchant and mediæval styles with the composer’s own usual one. Later I got hold of a programme and worked out what the words were about (being behind the singers it wasn’t so easy to pick them up).

After the interval was that one-time cult piece, Duruflé’s Requiem. This was accompanied only on the organ (no cello in the Pie Jesu) and I’m told without the aid of the CCTV screen, as a misadjusted light had made it unusable. We will be singing the Requiem again next year, when we take it on tour to Lisbon.

A couple of days earlier I was in York and caught an evensong for St William of York’s day at the Minster, complete with incense and a bit more ceremony than usual. Not a saint I’m familiar with, but he has his own anthem by no less than John Taverner.

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avoiding the Prayer Fayre

Posted on June 24, 2017 by vhk10

The Cathedral Chamber Choir sang at Wells Cathedral for the weekend of Trinity Sunday. Well, sort of, as on the Sunday afternoon we made way for a ‘prayer fayre’ in the Cathedral and decamped to St Cuthbert’s Church, together with a number of the Cathedral clergy (several others chose to be away altogether that weekend) and its congregation. We didn’t actually spend all that much time in Wells Cathedral itself, as we had only a short rehearsal there on Saturday and a very short one on the Sunday morning, apart from the services.

Wells proved a popular location despite the shortage of nearby accommodation, and we fielded a large choir. The main novelty to me in the music was Matthew Martin’s Responses, in a Vaughan Williams sort of style but with fashionable note clusters. Saturday was baroque day with Purcell in G minor canticles and Bach’s ‘Wer mich liebet’ (from the cantata BWV 74) which was new to just about all of us.

For the Sunday Eucharist we sang Byrd’s 4 part mass (I sang this a few weeks earlier for a funeral, and sang the Sanctus from it again the following week) and his Confirma hoc, Deus. Matins was Britten in C canticles and to keep rehearsal time simple Tallis’ If ye love me.

In St Cuthbert’s (where I sang Spem in Alium earlier in the year), we had a bit of a wallow with Wood in D and Beati quorum via by Stanford.

It was a rather poignant weekend for me as it was the last time I’d be singing for Matthew O’Donovan who is standing down as Musical Director of the choir in the summer. I’ve greatly enjoyed singing for him, including some of the best choir warm-ups around, and his great fairness in dealing with the singers in his choir (something which is very rare in my experience).

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