don’t pass remarks!

Posted on September 26, 2006 by vhk10

So I was often told – but not everyone in a choir follows this rule.

Singing develops certain skills which may have their uses outside performance. One is the ability to control volume precisely, and this can allow someone to say things audible to those around them in rehearsal, but out of earshot of the conductor! Many a choir practice in Manchester was enlivened by the dry comments of one of the singers just behind me. (I can’t remember any of them now, and without the context they probably wouldn’t be very amusing).

A less entertaining characteristic of singers is that almost by definition we like the sound of our own voices. This can have long-winded consequences at those evenings we all dread – the choir AGM.

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how I got into Prom 71

Posted on September 21, 2006 by vhk10

I only just made it to the Royal Albert Hall (the RPO and Daniele Gatti) in time thanks to a delayed train. Having arrived after the concert had sold out, I was prepared to be disappointed and had a reserve plan to cadge a ticket off someone leaving at the interval (there turned out to be a number of such people). But as I turned away I was called back by one of the people selling arena tickets, who had an unused complimentary ticket – my gratitude goes to them if they happen to be reading this. (I thought only singers, and in some cases conductors, nowadays had the kind of personal following Joshua Bell enjoys. Maybe there’s hope for classical music yet!)

My free seat was right up by the organ pipes, with an overhead view of the orchestra. It was slightly odd acoustically, as the sound was being projected away from you and it all sounded rather far away (because it was rather far away).

I don’t listen enough to Classic FM to have got tired of Bruch’s first violin concerto; this particular performance erred on the side of being severe rather than sickly, which is how I’d want it. But I was really there for the Shostakovich, his tenth symphony.

I don’t think I’d ever heard one of his symphonies live in the concert hall before. I was glad of my bird’s eye view of the orchestra as the themes were transformed by being passed around from section to section. The only instrument I couldn’t see easily was that vital one, the xylophone. I maintain that when the xylophone comes in, you can tell that a Shostakovich symphony is getting really serious; though actually it isn’t used much in no. 10. One can play the game of finding extra-musical significance almost endlessly with these symphonies; but as a reprise of the brutal music from the scherzo was stomped on by a fortissimo DSCH, it was hard not to sense relief and triumph that the composer had outlived Stalin. For further comments on the performance, I refer the reader to the Guardian‘s review.

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a visiting choir at Exeter Cathedral

Posted on September 7, 2006 by vhk10

I rather dropped into and out of the Cathedral Chamber Choir’s week at Exeter Cathedral. This week was keenly awaited because the choir has not (as far as I can tell) been to Exeter before, and had indeed been trying unsuccessfully for some years to get a week there, before my persistent enquiries paid off. I made a special excursion to Exeter on the Wednesday to sing my favourite canticle setting (the Gibbons Second Service) before returning at the weekend.

On the Saturday all the music for the service (bar the hymn tune) was by Donald James, who was associated with the choir in its early days. We enjoyed the anthem (a setting of Psalm 100) in particular and tried to work out the influences on it: Walton’s setting of the same text, Rejoice in the Lamb and I thought also the Holst Nunc Dimittis.

Sunday was busy with a Mass setting by a composer new to me, Rogier (his Mass Ego sum qui sum), and Howells’ Coll. Reg. Te Deum in the morning. On Sunday afternoon we had Elgar’s Give Unto the Lord (one of those pieces for which there never seems to be enough rehearsal time) and I did the soprano solo in Stanford in G.

I was glad to hear that the amplification system has been altered since I last sang in the choir stalls. Formerly, you were addressed not by the person whose lips you could see moving but by a distorted sound coming from a totally different direction. (Although the new system had a glitch on Sunday morning, when an echo effect made it sound as if all the president’s part was concelebrated!)

There are some matters which a visiting choir should be aware of which weren’t mentioned in the notes sent out in advance to us. The song school is no longer available for the use of visiting choirs. In the usual way some rehearsal time is available in the Cathedral itself when nothing else is going on there, but Exeter is busier in this respect than many Cathedrals and so this time can be limited. For example, during the summer (though not in school terms!) a guided tour is scheduled from 1.30-2.30 on Sunday afternoons (Evensong is at 3) and the choir is not supposed to rehearse in the Cathedral while this is going on. (We just went ahead and rehearsed then anyway).

Apart from that the Chapter House can be booked for rehearsals, although the choir may not necessarily have it to themselves (when I sang at Exeter in October a buffet lunch was being set up there during our rehearsal). We used the boys’ vestry next door as a lockable space for our music and gowns. It is a good idea to sort out rehearsal time in the Chapter House well in advance, especially if the choir isn’t meeting before it gets to Exeter.

[Since this was written, a new and very nice choir rehearsal room has been created and can be used by visiting choirs.]

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choosing a Prom

Posted on September 4, 2006 by vhk10

The end of the Proms season is nearly here, and I realised that I hadn’t yet been to one of the concerts. I considered Monday through to Friday as possibilities:

Monday: after Sunday’s concert was cancelled (and it didn’t even include A Short Ride in a Fast Machine!) I didn’t want to commit myself by buying a train ticket when I wasn’t sure the concert would go ahead.
Tuesday: I’m not a great fan of Rachmaninov’s orchestral music, and it’s not long since I last heard some at the Proms (a performance of The Bells).
Wednesday: Mahler 2 with Haitink would doubtless be wonderful, but I couldn’t get there sufficiently early to be sure of getting in, as it’s bound to be very popular.
Friday: ends a bit late and I don’t think that the Albert Hall is the best acoustic for listening to Mozart.

So it’s going to be Bruch and Shostakovich on Thursday night.

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Mass at Sénanque

Posted on August 31, 2006 by vhk10

I’ve been fortunate in finding myself near interesting French abbeys while on holiday. Two years ago it was Solesmes; this time I was a short drive from Sénanque, familiar before I visited because it’s on the cover of our copy of the Guide Vert for Provence. I attended a Mass there one Sunday; the music was simple four-part chants based on or inspired by Russian Orthodox chant, and included a couple of Orthodox hymns. It was led by half a dozen monks, and sheets with the music on were given to the congregation so we could join in. Although the location is remote, there were a couple of hundred in the congregation; it shows that this type of liturgy really is appreciated and sought out. I realised what the alternative might be later in the morning as I stood outside a local church where Mass was ending; it was a ‘karaoke’ Mass where the congregation was expected to sing along to a tape recorded in a much larger church.

Solemn Mass at Sénanque is at 10 a.m. on Sundays and feast days.

This wasn’t the only musical event on our holiday. My husband went to a concert as part of a local string quartet festival in a nearby village. Doubtless the success of the festival (which has been going for over 30 years) may say something about the cultural tastes of the sort of people who go on holiday in the area, but no one really loses out; members of string quartets are human and likely to enjoy visiting the South of France as much as anyone else.

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walking on Ted Heath

Posted on August 3, 2006 by vhk10

You may now find yourself doing this while processing in and out of evensong at Salisbury Cathedral, which I returned to last weekend with the Erleigh Cantors. Looking back, I see that my last trip there, three years ago, was the first proper entry in this blog.

It was a busy weekend as we sang five services including a wedding. I’d already been in touch with the bride, as she contacted me a few months ago when the Cathedral gave her the name of the choir singing at her wedding but no contact details; I provided them for her. So the blog has some practical uses.

There were a few pieces new to me: firstly, an early Pater Noster by Stanford in 8 parts, slightly awkwardly written. I’d never done Greene in C evening canticles before, although I have heard them on broadcasts; probably because they too are in 8 parts at times, and on a rather grander scale than other canticle settings of the period. We also sang two movements from Rutter’s Psalmfest: a setting of the Jubilate and I will lift up mine eyes, where the influence of the Chichester Psalms made itself felt.

Some of the music was pretty demanding, especially at the high pitch of Salisbury’s organ. On Sunday morning we had Wills’ Missa Eliensis followed at Matins by Elgar’s wonderful Te Deum. (The Rutter Jubilate wasn’t a pushover either). Our afternoon evensong duplicated the BBC’s recent broadcast from Durham: Howells’ St. Paul’s Service followed by Leighton’s Let all the world, the latter being a fine example of the style a friend calls ‘Anglican spiky’. We sang it a while back at Worcester, but the choir was depleted then because of illness so it was good to do it at full strength. And the Elgar and Howells are on my wishlist.

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the land of fruit, hops, cider and poets

Posted on July 26, 2006 by vhk10

Herefordshire, according to the side of a punnet of raspberries in the fridge. I’ve returned from a weekend of services at Hereford Cathedral with Priory Voices.

On a visit some years ago, I was collared as I emerged from the Mappa Mundi exhibition by someone from the Hereford and Worcester tourist board armed with a clipboard. They asked me various questions about my visit and then invited me to rate the tourist attraction I was currently visiting out of 10 compared with other similar attractions. I thought hard, and gave Hereford Cathedral 7 out of 10. But what can they do about it? It can hardly be replaced by the cathedral and setting of Durham or Salisbury. I might have rated it a little higher if I’d been able to see the beautiful chapter house, but I was a couple of hundred years too late for that.

The music for this trip was all known to me and a mixture of some Priory Voices favourites (Kelly’s Jamaican Canticles, Mozart’s ‘Sparrow’ Mass, Alessandro Scarlatti’s beautiful Iste Confessor) with more some familiar numbers such as Howells’ Gloucester canticles and Wash me throughly. The Kelly was the trickiest piece, not so much because of syncopated rhythms as because of the irregular bar lengths in places combined with the need for fast articulation; it’s certainly harder than Kelly in C.

We were well looked after and given sherry after the Sunday morning services. It’s been a long time since I’ve sung at Hereford, and I hope it won’t be so long before I return there.

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a double dose of Pushkin

Posted on July 19, 2006 by vhk10

I was intrigued by Mazeppa when I heard a broadcast from the Met last winter, so I took advantage of the opportunity to go to the WNO performance at the Hippodrome in Bristol.

Why is a work of this quality not performed more often? Perhaps it is because audiences don’t expect Tchaikovsky to get this dark, though it’s a bit less surprising when you think of the 6th Symphony. One piece of light relief, the gopak in Act One, was cut in this performance. I wasn’t terribly lucky in the night I went as a couple of singers were clearly below par and showing signs of wear and tear as the evening went on. I found the lead soprano tended to overact in the earlier scenes (later on it didn’t matter). The Guardian‘s review is here.

There’s a striking resemblance between the end of the opera and that of The Rake’s Progress, and there’s a historical link too; Stravinsky’s father played Orlik in one of the first performances of Mazeppa.

The opera was re-set in Stalinist times; this mattered less by the end (17th-century rubble doesn’t look so very different from mid-20th century rubble). The staging did lose one thing: the arrival too late of Maria and her mother at the execution. We never saw them there, so it was unclear whether they’d tried to intervene.

On Thursday I was in London in that slack period after the Wigmore Hall and ENO shut for the summer and before the Proms start. This time the City of London Festival came to the rescue and provided an early evening concert of Pushkin settings given by Joan Rogers in St Giles Cripplegate. The accompanist was Christopher Glynn (stepping in at short notice) who came into his own later in the programme after the rather predictable accompaniments to the Glinka songs which opened it. The other composers performed were Rimsky-Korsakov, Medtner, Tchaikovsky, Rubenstein, and Mussorgsky (a pity we didn’t have any by Rachmaninov). We had some multiple settings of the same texts. The recital will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 one lunchtime early in August.

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a double dose of Tchaikovsky

Posted on July 5, 2006 by vhk10

I performed Tchaikovsky’s Hymn to the Trinity during an ordination service on Sunday night. There was more choral music at the first mass the following night: I sang Byrd’s Tu es Petrus for the first time and also a rare chance to sing And can it be?, one of the few evangelical hymns I miss.

My second dose of Tchaikovsky was WNO’s Mazeppa at the Bristol Hippodrome on Saturday night, but I’ll save that for another post.

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il metodo pratico

Posted on June 30, 2006 by vhk10

I’ve been rediscovering the ‘Metodo Pratico’ by Vaccai, which I first encountered some years ago with another teacher. It’s a set of short Italian songs, each designed to test at least aspect of technique, mostly articulation (which is what we mostly use it for), ornaments or a particular interval. Some are far from straightforward such as the rather misleadingly-titled ‘Preparatory exercise for the Mordent’ which in fact uses a variety of florid ornamentation. The words are very generic, apart from some Risorgimento sentiments in the recitative exercise.
I have it for ‘medium voice’ which ranges from middle C to the second F above it. I don’t need a higher-voice edition but I’d be interested to know if one exists. My teacher has one in a slightly lower set of keys, so we have to swap copies when I sing these exercises.

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High Mass in the Duomo

Posted on June 16, 2006 by vhk10

During my trip to Milan a couple of weeks ago I was able to attend the main Sunday Mass in the Cathedral, for the Sunday after Ascension Day. It was presided over by the Cardinal Archbishop (one of last year’s papabili) and was liturgically spectacular (particularly when the Easter candle was slowly winched all the way to the roof) but the music didn’t really match up. A largish choir of men and boys sang a largely unison mass setting and a couple of hymns (one of which, disconcertingly, went to the tune of Hark! the herald angels sing). No music was supplied to the congregation.

Last autumn in Venice I fared rather better. At the main Sunday Mass in San Marco a mixed-voice choir sang a 19th century (or pastiche of the style) four-part setting, though not a very interesting one. I also went to a Mass for All Saints’ Day there; no choir, but a sheet with the words and music to several hymns so that the congregation could join in.

The best I’ve done in an Italian cathedral was a mass in the Duomo in Florence, I think the last Mass of Sunday morning. The music came from a small book of plainchant melodies which we were given.

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an upbeat string quartet

Posted on June 7, 2006 by vhk10

We missed a lot of this year’s new-look Bath Festival, unfortunately, but we did manage each to get to a concert by the Vanbrugh Quartet in the Assembly Rooms.

My husband and daughter heard Haydn, Beethoven (Op. 131) and Bartók’s 6th quartet. The Bartók was in fact the second time they’d heard this piece in recent months and I was told that this performance had greater clarity of detail than the other.

I went to hear Zemlinsky and Beethoven’s Op. 132 in a rather thinly-attended concert the following night. I don’t think I’d heard the Zemlinsky quartet (his first) before. It was ‘upbeat’ in more ways than one; as well as being generally sunny in mood, most of the themes began with an anacrusis, or felt as if they did, which became an irritating mannerism after a while.

The Beethoven quartet is my favourite of all his quartets and having got to know it early I would now recognise it instantly from the smallest extract. A problem I had with the performers, shared by others in the audience, was the self-effacing sound of the first violin and more generally a lack of drama about the performances. This was less of a difficulty in the more contrapuntal Heiliger Dankgesang than in the outer movements.

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