three days in Gloucester

Posted on September 5, 2008 by vhk10

The Erleigh Cantors did a long weekend this summer, including a Friday evensong. There were four services and a lot of music (we did introits) so I’ll just refer to some highlights.

The only totally new piece to me was the Langlais Messe Solennelle referred to in the last posting here. The organ was well suited to this piece, though the Benedictus must be one of the loudest pieces I’ve ever sung during communion! A few of us (myself included) put in the top C’s in the Hosannas.

New in part was Palestrina’s Tu es Petrus which I’ve only previously sung from a cut-down version, without the central section which is included in European Sacred Music.

We did again some music from previous visits, such as the Robert Fayrfax faux-bordon canticles (in fact only the Mag is by Fayrfax – the composer of the Nunc is unknown and the descant is by the editor!), Wood’s expansive canticles in F and Rubbra in A flat. This last was described by our conductor on a previous occasion as ‘a piece for organ and a piece for choir, to be performed simultaneously’! Also Lassus’ Justorum Animae, which we have been trying and failing to slip into the order of service as an introit for a couple of years!

Some things about Gloucester haven’t changed since I visited with Priory Voices in 2003. The five-and-a-half octave piano in the choir rehearsal room hasn’t been replaced yet, and it can still take a long time to get served with food and drink (I’m not especially thinking of the Cathedral refectory here).

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requirements for the Langlais Messe Solennelle

Posted on August 27, 2008 by vhk10

I sang this in Gloucester Cathedral in July (writeup to follow) and was asked by the conductor of another choir to say whether I thought it would be viable for one of his cathedral weekends. Here’s the list of minimum requirements I gave, with some specifics omitted. The choir is composed of good sight-singers and meets without prior rehearsal, but music and recordings are supplied to members in advance.

a) an organ capable of doing the work justice (Gloucester’s certainly is)
b) an organist of similar capabilities!
c) 3-4 sopranos who can reliably hit the top C’s in the Hosannas. Strictly speaking these are optional and don’t even appear in the choir scores, but congregations who’ve heard the work will expect them. It’s like interpolated high notes in operatic arias. [I’m told that when Langlais heard about this interpolated note he said that he would have written it himself, but didn’t think choirs would be able to attempt it.] I know of no other work one might sing in a church service which has a top C for the choir trebles/sopranos (as opposed to a soloist).
d) a quorum of singers who have done the work before who can lead their sections. I would say one on each part on each side. This work is hard to learn in advance from a score and a CD for reason e) below.
e) adequately annotated scores. You need a second mortgage to afford a full score, and the ‘choir’ version has no leads or anything else from the organ part in it. I had a hired copy which had some leads pencilled in, which helped a lot with learning.

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a fleeting trip to Worcester

Posted on August 1, 2008 by vhk10

I paid a brief visit to Worcester Cathedral on Saturday July 19th to sing Evensong. This was (nominally) a Priory Voices event, with a large admixture of Congleton Choral Society singers. Unfortunately I couldn’t do the whole weekend, so missed the Widor Mass on the Sunday. Saturday’s music was Noble in B minor and They that go down by Sumsion and Neary responses. The Quire organ wasn’t quite ready for us so we sang in the Nave with a temporary instrument. It was a shame not to get much chance to socialise but I’ll be back with the choir in Wells in the autumn.

Next up: a write up of the Erleigh Cantors in Gloucester.

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a fiesta of vibrant choral music

Posted on July 24, 2008 by vhk10

That was my tagline for the Facebook entry for the Chandos Singers’ recent concert of Latin American baroque music. This covered some of the same ground as the Latin American concert I sang with the Exultate Singers a while back. In fact, three of the same pieces reappeared, so maybe a standard concert repertory for this area is emerging already, at least for vernacular pieces. Anyway there was some variety as the interpretations this time round weren’t necessarily similar.

The Latin sacred pieces, by Franco and de Padilla (including his Mass Ego flos campi), were all new to me. For the second concert in a row we sang a setting of the Marian litany, a text whose repetitiveness is clearly a challenge to composers. Here it was varied rhythms which were used to make it interesting.

I still don’t have much of a picture of what conditions were like for the composers of these pieces. Were they working on their own in a remote church in a clearing hacked out of the jungle, with no contact with other composers and not seeing any recently published music – so forced to go their own way? Or were they the first down at the docks when a ship came in from Spain bearing editions of the latest choral works from Europe?

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DD

Posted on July 3, 2008 by vhk10

I am performing Wood’s ‘Collegium Regale’ evening canticles shortly with the Erleigh Cantors, for the first time in a while. These pieces rather unusually have rehearsal letters in (I have a legally photocopied reprint of a 1920 ‘Year Book Press’ edition). Church music tends not to use them, because the pieces aren’t very long and everyone usually has identical copies with all bars written out, so you can refer to page or bar numbers in rehearsal. (An exception is the type of irritating French edition which omits the organ part and organ-only bars. I’m performing from one of those soon as well, but will leave it for another post).

Rehearsal letters in the Magnificat of Wood ‘Coll. Reg.’ run from A-K, with a curious exception: a ‘DD’ between D and E at the top of page 6 in my edition. DD’s when used as rehearsal letters generally occur in very long movements after you’ve run through the alphabet from A-Z and have to start again with AA. So what is this one doing here? I know Wood was Irish, but was the editor Welsh? Is it something to do with bra sizes? Or more boringly did they simply find that the gap between D and E was too large and they needed an intermediate rehearsal letter?

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another return to St Alban’s

Posted on July 1, 2008 by vhk10

When I last sang with Lyra Davidica, Princess Diana was alive and Sri Lanka were scoring 952/6 against India (I recall someone bursting into breakfast on that choir tour brandishing a newspaper: ‘Just LOOK at THIS!!’). In the meantime I faded from the memories of most people associated with the choir, but I remained on the email list and was able to join a choir weekend at St Alban’s at the end of May. (St. Alban’s Abbey/Cathedral is beginning to feel like a home from home; this is the third time I have sung there in 18 months, with 3 different choirs. In fact I was also invited to sing there on the previous Monday, with yet another choir, but was doing the B minor mass instead.)

The music for the evensong and Eucharist that we sang was well-known to me, with the exception of Brian Moles’ setting of ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’ which I believe the choir premiered recently. The Cathedral is in a certain amount of disarray at the moment as the organ is being rebuilt and there is scaffolding in the nave which reduces the acoustic; but I can see why they might want to do these two pieces of work at the same time.

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grade 1 piano

Posted on June 20, 2008 by vhk10

My daughter did Grade 1 piano about a week ago. I cast my mind back to dim memories when I was doing the same exam and tried to compare the experiences. For one thing, the Associated Board has livened up the covers of its exam books a bit from the dreary monochrome grey and brown ones I remember. Within, the pieces are not as easy as I’d expected and you now do one in a jazzier style (at least my daughter did). I think this is a good thing as I didn’t really get to grips with jazz rhythms at that stage and still find them a challenge at times (for example in the Birthday Madrigals by Rutter a couple of years ago). They are definitely a part of being musically literate.

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a plea to the Barbican

Posted on June 19, 2008 by vhk10

To make it up to my daughter for having forgotten the LSO concert at the Bath Festival, my husband took her to the Barbican in London to hear the same performers and composers, but different symphonies (Schubert’s Unfinished and Bruckner’s 6th). He carefully calculated the length of the pieces from our recordings, allowed a little extra for luck and booked tickets for a particular train back to Bath afterwards accordingly.

However all these calculations were thrown when an extra piece appeared on the programme unheralded. It turned out to be Azalea Fragments by Joe Duddell, conducted by Pavel Kotla. The composer took a bow, but few in the audience knew who he was, as in order to find out you would have had to have bought the full programme, rather than just picking up the programme notes as my family and most of the rest of the audience had done.

Now it’s good to have a new piece programmed alongside war-horses, but why was it so hard to find out what it was called, what it was about, who wrote it, who conducted it and some biography about these people? Even the full programme only gave the names of the performers and the piece, and a relative of my husband’s who deps in the LSO happened to be playing but couldn’t supply any more details. The Barbican is festooned with information screens which could have given some clue, or someone could have stood up and said a few words before the performance.

My gripe isn’t just about this but also that the extra unpublicised piece in the concert created problems for the return train journey (a taxi did get them there in time). Are concert audiences in London really so frightened of new music that they won’t come if it’s advertised in advance? The Barbican did something similar when I last went to a concert there, a few years ago; there was a lengthy speech which caused the concert to end some ten minutes later than expected.

So I would repeat what I said in a letter to the management after that concert; remember that a part of your audience comes from outside London and may be booked on a particular train out of London. If the concert ends significantly later than scheduled, they may miss that train, which could mean the difference between being home at midnight and being home at 2 a.m., and could be expensive if their ticket was valid for the earlier train only, as cheaper tickets generally now are. Even if this doesn’t happen, their enjoyment of the concert will be spoiled by worries about the return journey. If they are regular concert-goers in London, they may desert the Barbican in favour of venues where concerts end at a predictable time.

The Guardian reviewed the concert here, the Times here, both very favourably, and the Sunday Times complains about lack of information about the Duddell here.

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two other 2008 Bath Festival concerts

Posted on June 12, 2008 by vhk10

I wasn’t able to attend more than two concerts because of my own singing commitments during the Festival but others in the family got out more. My husband went to the concert of Indian classical music given by Partho Sarothy and Kausik Sen at the Invention Studios. There used to be more Indian music in Bath – perhaps to entertain people who’d retired there after serving in the Raj – but now you usually have to go to Bristol to hear it. The concert was good but the venue rather gloomy with its dark walls.

He also took our elder son to hear Natalie Clein and Kathy Stott. This was our son’s first concert and we noticed throughout the festival that there were a few more young people at concerts than in some previous years. They thought the Rachmaninov op. 19 cello sonata came off best; the programme also contained one of Bach’s cello suites. Shostakovich’s op. 40 sonata had the feel of a piece written by someone who was still getting a feel for the instrument and not trying anything too daring. The concert ended with a tango by Piazzolla (who also supplied the encore). Suddenly there seems to be a lot of his music around and while it is enjoyable to listen to I’m not sure how much real merit it has and whether he will survive being currently flavour of the month.

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two piano recitals

Posted on June 10, 2008 by vhk10

I have a great backlog of recent/current events to write about. I’ll continue with a further writeup of the 2008 Bath Festival.

We had a ticket for Alfredo Perl, but sadly he was nursing an injury and pulled out, taking the Schoenberg and Diabelli Variations on his programme with him. His replacement was Jean-Efflam Bavouzet playing an early Beethoven sonata, Ravel and Debussy. My husband went and enjoyed the performances but wondered whether the pianist was playing the programme he’d have chosen if he’d been given an absolutely free hand. In particular, was he really wanting to play Gaspard de la Nuit?

The reason he couldn’t was that this piece ended Yevgeny Sudbin’s recital a few days later. I went to this and had no complaints about the technical standard, though what I missed was a sense of the artist’s personality coming through. I wish he’d played more Chopin (we had two mazurkas) as for me that came off best. We also heard two Haydn sonatas and a selection of early Scriabin mazurkas which didn’t convert me to that composer. The encores were generous in length.

We appreciated the ice-cream which is now on sale, along with coffee and muffins, in the interval of concerts at the Assembly Rooms. (But you need be quick to join the queue to have time to eat it!)

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Bach’s B minor Mass

Posted on June 4, 2008 by vhk10

A few weeks ago I was listening to Bach’s B minor mass on the radio and regretting as I always do that I’d never sung soprano in a performance. (I did sing in a performance as a student, with the Schola Cantorum of Oxford. But they used me as an alto, and because several of the altos were really sopranos, some male choral scholars had to be drafted in at the last minute to boost the low end. It didn’t work very well! Since then I’d narrowly missed a number of performances by joining or leaving a choir at the wrong time).

The following day a flyer was put into my hand inviting me to join the Frome Festival Chorus for a performance in Wells Cathedral, preceded by intensive rehearsal. I jumped at the chance, and now this particular gap in my performing history has been filled.

Now you may say that a chorus of going on for 200 people is not the way to perform this work, and of course this is right, as it is far in excess of the forces Bach wrote for. But Bach’s music gets played in all sorts of instrumentations he never dreamed of (many were played in the BBC’s Bach Christmas in 2005) and somehow the greatness seems to survive. And I was too ashamed of the fact I’d never sung the Mass as a soprano!

When we got rehearsing I found the notes slipped into place fairly easily, probably because I have heard the Mass so many times. This may explain why when I did sing wrong notes they were usually other notes in the harmony!

I’ll end with some observations on recordings. The first one I really listened to was lent to me when it was a real novelty: Joshua Rifkin’s one-voice-to-a-part version. I can only admire the stamina of his singers, though I wonder if they ever performed it this way all in one go rather than recording it in several takes. Later I heard the John Eliot Gardiner recording, which divides listeners sharply. I admit that I was deeply disappointed by it – I expected so much more from the performers but it seemed to lack drive and a sense of direction. In the end I had to insist that we give it away and replace it with one that I could bear to listen to. We now have the Herreweghe version which I find sometimes on the fast side so that details whizz by before you can take them in, but am generally happy with.

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the Hilliards in Christ Church

Posted on June 2, 2008 by vhk10

I got along to hear the Hilliard Ensemble at Christ Church Julian Road, as did quite a lot of people I knew. Dufay isn’t quite my style somehow, but I enjoyed the programme which mixed old and new. All beautifully performed and blended, even with Robin Blaze coming in as a substitution for David James, and carefully using different combinations of singers so everyone got a rest or a chance to shine.

I have a gripe about the programme that was handed out – no translations! I can just about make out the general sense of Renaissance French and Italian, but this ability can’t be assumed. Even some indication for each piece of the general import of the words, not necessarily a full translation, would have been an improvement. And it would have been nice to have had some background about the text of Whale Rant by Elizabeth Liddle.

The Guardian‘s review is here. I agree with the 4-star rating they awarded.

I’m not going to very much in the Bath Festival this year. I thought about the Messiaen centenary concert in the Abbey but decided that after last year I didn’t need to hear the Trois petites liturgies again so soon.

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