a first hearing of the Bath Cantata Group

Posted on April 3, 2015 by vhk10

The Bach Cantata Group perform at least once a year in St. Stephen’s Church very near us but I’d never been to hear them. They gave a concert under the direction of Neil Moore accompanied by an orchestra led by Matthew Taylor.

I have a recording of Handel’s The ways of Zion do mourn, reworked as the opening of Israel in Egypt. It doesn’t sit easily there, as it makes the oratorio very long and there isn’t much reason to be still lamenting the death of Joseph generations later in Moses’ time. This performance didn’t really sell the piece to me as it never really seems to take off. A funerary piece that does came in the second half.

Duruflé’s Requiem was given in the version for string orchestra plus trumpets/timpani/harp, which I’ve never done (although I have sung in the version with full orchestra). Even in this version you get lots of counterpoint that isn’t nearly so obvious when accompanied by organ only. We also had Duruflé’s motets, a trickier test for the choir as they are unaccompanied.

The programme was a demanding one with much for the chorus to do. The tuning was good, especially the upper voices, although the choir was not so confident with the changes of tempo in the Duruflé Requiem. I’m not sure what the unaugmented forces of the Cantata Group would sound like; there was at least one ‘bumper’ who joined the choir on the day.

I still can’t stand the acoustic in this church, which amplifies noise immediately around (my neighbour cleared their throat frequently and sang along to one of the motets) at the expense of that from the performers. But I did like the ladies’ dress code; black with something red (which could be a sash, necklace, corsage or other adornment).

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couples in the choir

Posted on March 31, 2015 by vhk10

Most adult choirs contain at least one couple, and some several more. This is usually a positive thing, but there are certain situations where it can be a liability in some ways:

a) the conductor’s partner who does the choir admin. This is sometimes a way for a conductor to keep tight control of the choir while appearing to relinquish some of it. I remember telephoning the membership secretary of a choir whose conductor was dragging his feet about auditions, and leaving a message, only to learn later that I’d left the message with the conductor, who probably never passed it on. A further problem can arise when the couple who between them run the choir split up.

b) the weaker half. It can happen that a singer who would not otherwise make it into the choir is admitted as a way of securing the services of their partner. (I know of no cases of this in any choir I currently sing with, however.) I once toured with a well-known choir (it broadcasts) whose soprano section seemed to be largely made up of such people, which was hard work for the others!

c) the social black holes. We’ve all met them – the couples who talk only to one another. If anyone makes the mistake of trying to talk one of them, they turn to the other and murmur something quietly. Best thing to do is to note which ones they are and ignore them too.

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The Bachfest 2015

Posted on March 22, 2015 by vhk10

The Bachfest is the descendant of the Bach festivals which were once built around the Chantry Singers, and which has outlived them. My husband went to hear the Academy of Ancient Music under Bojan Čičić playing mostly J. S. Bach (plus the Fifth Suite, which was once attributed to him) in the Assembly Rooms. Like many concerts in the Bachfest, this all but sold out and both performers and audience are reported to have appeared to enjoy themselves. (One audience member though was asking an interesting question: why did the Bachfest, in a city with a cathedral-standard organ, include no organ recital?)

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Coned off

Posted on March 13, 2015 by vhk10

I’d never been to a performance by Bath Opera although various people I know have been involved with the company. But when they put on Peter Grimes (an opera that they also staged some 20 years ago) I felt I had to go.

The 3 performances sold out, and as well as the regular following of Bath Opera had clearly drawn an audience from some distance (apparently across the Severn in some cases). I arrived on spec and for the first half sat in a spare fire-warden’s seat with the double bass and harp between me and the stage (the latter instrument having a large part to play in this work). For the second half I had an unobscured view from a seat that was confirmed as vacant.

I had never been to a live performance and I appreciated much that I hadn’t noticed before, such as the way that the music of the sea interludes generates much of the material for the scenes which follow them. The highlight for me was the quartet for Auntie, the Nieces (all the ‘respectable’ people having gone off to organise persecution of Grimes) and Ellen; I’d not thought of Britten as a composer of female solidarity before.

This opera affords chorus parts for all ages, and if they were occasionally slightly ragged, this only added versimilitude. The acting was convincing throughout The performance was fitted into a school theatre and the soloists sang over the orchestra (conducted by Peter Blackwood) in the confined space with varying degrees of success: Bulstrode (Niall Hoskin) achieving this best. Rupert Drury and Julia O’Connor were the leads.

The sets were straightforward, with the sea suggested by video projected on to the back of the stage. Just after the embroidery aria, this came unstuck and behind Ellen and Bulstrode there briefly appeared not waves, but a Windows desktop with a large image of a traffic cone (the logo of the DVD software). It says much for the performance that this did not diminish its impact.

Review

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What is it about Hereford Cathedral?

Posted on March 9, 2015 by vhk10

The lead time for booking a visiting choir at a Cathedral gets ever longer. I have been sorting out a week for August 2018 and have booked one of a couple of available weeks in Winchester. A couple of other major ancient Cathedrals had just one week left. But Hereford is booked up and we have to wait for 2019 to try to go there. (After an attempt to book them in 2016 we were told we would be contacted when 2017 booking opened, but we never were).

Part of the reason is that the 3 Choirs Festival will be held in Hereford in 2018, which reduces available time for visiting choirs by a week, but it always seems to book up earlier than other comparable Cathedrals. The Willis organ was in great demand by organists after a rebuild, but that was a decade ago. Any other suggestions why Hereford is more popular than, say, Salisbury or Durham? Is it the cider?

[August 2015: I have a partial answer. They like inviting back choirs whose visits have gone well. One such choir (which I have sung with) sang there 12 years ago and has been offered two summer weeks since then, without needing to request them. Once these choirs have been accommodated, there are few weeks left over for anyone else.]

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A chorister watches The Theory of Everything

Posted on March 8, 2015 by vhk10

It’s a strange experience to watch a bio-pic of someone who used to have the singing lesson after yours. Members of Stephen Hawking’s family crossed my path in various ways when I was in Cambridge. I don’t think I ever sang in a choir with his wife Jane, but we shared a singing teacher.

In one scene she joins her church choir. Often scenes of music making in films are very inaccurate, particularly church music (anyone remember the village church with a full-scale Cathedral choir and acoustic in A Room with a View?) This one had singers of the right sort of standard singing plausible music (Mozart’s Ave Verum, rather curiously abridged) in a typical-looking parish church (though interior and exterior shots didn’t match). What amused me most about this scene was that Mrs Hawking was told (without having been auditioned) ‘You will be a valuable asset’. Exactly the same words as said to me when I was last auditioned (although I don’t think I was described as ‘valuable’!)

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The Down Gin service

Posted on February 22, 2015 by vhk10

I joined the choir of St. Peter’s Caversham to sing an evensong at Bristol Cathedral. Most of the music was familiar (Clucas responses, with his rather less familiar Lord’s Prayer, Bainton, Bairstow), but the canticles were new to me: Bob Chilcott’s Downing Service. The existence of this service illustrates the greater attention paid recently to choral music in Colleges which previously had not gone in for it very much. Downing would never have commissioned a canticle setting from a major composer in the 1980’s, for example. I’d guess Chilcott’s service was linked to the major rebuild of the Chapel organ a few years ago. It is harmonically very simple but rhythmically complex with frequent changes of time signature.

We were made welcome by Bristol and given tea in the Chapter House (with flapjacks!) before the service.

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Toward the Unknown Region

Posted on February 17, 2015 by vhk10

This piece was only a name to me until I signed up for Bristol Choral Society’s Come and Sing, which this year featured the music of Vaughan Williams. It’s a ‘song’ for choir in a genre which has now gone out of fashion: a setting of a poem for chorus and orchestra lasting about 10 minutes. (Blest Pair of Sirens. which you also don’t hear very much these days, is another example.) It’s an early work, mixing some rather four-square material with more harmonically daring passages.

Over 200 of us gathered at Tyndale Baptist Church, a handsome building notable for its stained glass windows (it’s a pity though that the lovely central east window can no longer be illuminated by natural light). Our other piece was the Mass in G minor. I’ve sung most possible bits of this over the years: first and second soprano parts, and most of the solos. But I’m not very familiar with the second soprano line and I don’t think I’d ever sung the Creed, so I had some learning to do even in this much more familiar work.

At the end of the day we sang through both pieces with the piano impersonating the orchestra in Toward the Unknown Region and discreetly accompanying in the Mass (to avoid the loss of pitch which Vaughan Williams clearly anticipated to judge by his comments in the score).

We were told that Vaughan Williams has been a bit out of fashion recently, which may partly explain why there are many important choral works by him that I’ve never sung: the Sea Symphony (this may change soon, though), Hodie, Dona Nobis Pacem, Sancta Civitas, the Oxford Elegy and, astonishingly, his Fantasia on Christmas Carols. [2020 update: I’ve now done the symphony, Dona Nobis Pacem and the Fantasia.

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The wheel turns again?

Posted on February 8, 2015 by vhk10

Back in the early years of the millennium, there was a shortage of choral singers in Bristol, with choirs all fishing in the same limited pool. After some defections and outright poaching, the Brandon Hill Singers could not recruit new members in order to stay viable. A few years later the situation was very different. I enquired about one of the large choirs in the city, and was put on a ‘waiting list’ for auditions – I never heard from that choir again. I heard from another source around that time that all the city’s choirs had such waiting lists.

In 2012 I joined Bristol Choral Society by means of what I understand is the standard procedure – I came to a few rehearsals, and then auditioned. I spoke recently to a member of that other choir with the waiting list, who told me that their choir did indeed once make people wait years on end for an audition, but after a change of membership secretary they now audition all prospective singers quickly.

I sense there’s been another change in Bristol’s choral culture. Here are some possibilities:

  • We may be back where we were a dozen years ago, where singers are a scarce resource that choirs compete for. Some choirs have appeared or expanded recently, so this is quite plausible. [2016 – Bristol Cathedral Concert choir appears to have been the victim and gone under this time.]
  • It’s been realised that waiting lists for auditions are, in my words, ‘miserable alternatives to singing’ and so they have been abolished out of courtesy to prospective singers. I’d like to think this was the case, though realistically I have to doubt it
  • It’s been realised that by putting people off unheard, choirs may damage themselves by losing good singers who will be recruited by their rivals
  • There hasn’t been an overall change at all; I just had the misfortune to encounter a tidy-minded membership secretary who didn’t wish to deviate from a set quota of singers in each voice (but who didn’t bother to contact those on the waiting list when a vacancy appeared)
  • Choirs are now more relaxed about numbers of singers because as audiences shrink they need the income from subscriptions. A cynical view perhaps, but at least one choir round here has been known quietly to drop singers while continuing to collect their subscriptions by direct debit, because the money is useful even if the voice isn’t.

Comments?

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an extraordinary corset

Posted on February 8, 2015 by vhk10

Cinecasts of opera performances are popular these days, but I’ve never been to one until last week, when we went to Andrea Chénier, beamed from the Royal Opera House to our local Odeon. I admit to having a soft spot for this particular opera, despite not being a verismo enthusiast. It may take a bit of time to get going, and there is a rather bewildering cast of characters who come and go (Bersi in particular could have been made more of – she disappears after Act II), but that ending! And you have to love an opera which contains the line (in the translation in our recording) ‘Your corset is truly extraordinary!’

Actually we heard about corsets in rather more detail in one of the interval features, where they interviewed members of the cast. I don’t really like this, as I’d rather still think of these people in character. However Antonio Pappano (speaking before the performance began) contributed some useful insights.

To really make this opera work, you have to have outstanding singers, and all the principals delivered the goods, especially Jonas Kaufmann in the title role. The production was a lavish one and very faithful to the period, except what was that green liquid in L’Incredibile’s glass in Act II meant to be? Surely not absinthe, which had only very recently been invented, or crème de menthe, whose heyday was the early 20th century; neither would have been the tipple of choice of a French Revolutionary spy.

Opera performances transfer quite well to cinema, once you get used to the close-ups of people singing at full blast (quite good for studying technique, though), and the necessary confines of the stage. The fashion for ‘filmed opera’, in real locations and with the singers miming to a soundtrack of their own performances, seems to have died out a while back. But cinecasts are cheaper to make and can therefore be rolled out in greater numbers.

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a sad visit to Cambridge

Posted on February 1, 2015 by vhk10

I am not yet at the age where one regularly attends funerals of friends who were no older than oneself, but one such occasion took me to Cambridge early in the New Year. I had once been a member of the choir at the church where it took place, and since those days the musical establishment at the church has (contrary to the common pattern) expanded and been invested in. We sang some favourite pieces of my late friend, ending with the hymn tune Coe Fen; where more appropriate to sing it than a couple of minutes’ walk from Coe Fen itself? And I learnt that we had shared a love of Franck’s Chorale in A minor, the closing voluntary. Not that any of this afforded very much consolation.

Singing at very emotional occasions (and I have done a few, including funerals of children and young people) is always potentially fraught. I would still rather be in the choir at such times, as its liturgical role gives something to focus on.

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retaining the tonality of A

Posted on January 20, 2015 by vhk10

I can’t actually remember which tonality we had to retain during the Gospel reading at Worcester Cathedral, but our musicianship was tested by having to remember the note needed for the response afterwards.

For the third time in my last four Cathedral visits we (in this case the Cathedral Chamber Choir) couldn’t use the Cathedral’s own song room, though in this case the Cathedral choir couldn’t either. The rather lovely Cathedral song room at Worcester was being refurbished, so a section of the cloister was partitioned off and equipped with heaters. At least the weather was relatively mild during our visit.

Saturday’s evensong had some personal favourites – Poulenc’s Videntes Stellam and Gibbons’ Second Service (in which I sang the 2nd soprano verse part); the Gibbons remains my favourite canticle setting. On the Sunday our Mass setting was Victoria’s on O magnum mysterium, which I’ve done a number of times over the years. Our setting in the evening was Bairstow’s in D, which I’ve only ever sung with this choir. We picked some Epiphany anthems (slightly jumping the gun as the Cathedral didn’t transfer Epiphany to the Sunday): Here is the little door by Howells and When Jesus our Lord/There shall a star by Mendelssohn.

We raised a large choir for this weekend; the time after Christmas is surprisingly popular, perhaps because people feel a need to do something active. I was struggling a bit with the remains of a cold I’d had a week earlier. Although I’ve sung at Worcester before, I’d never before left it by train on a Sunday; the experience is not recommended as trains are infrequent and there’s nowhere sensible to wait at Foregate St.

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