Low Notes 4

By David Ward

September 2016. This is the latest in an erratic series of newsletters about the choir that will include information about what we are singing plus irrelevant ramblings and observations from the back row of the basses.

New season, new website: Steve Thorpe has designed an excellent, clear site for us; zones with information about the choir, its programmes and reviews. There is also a useful calendar that lists every practice and concert, plus an archive of these newsletters (with a very dodgy picture of me).

Find the website here:  www.bollfestchoir.org.uk

It was encouraging to see a pretty good turn-out on September 6 but we could do with a few extra sopranos and perhaps tenors so if you know anyone who fancies a sing, please do some arm twisting.

The Christmas concert has an enterprising and original programme. The choir has sung works by Cecilia McDowall before and I think we have sensed an original voice from a composer who both pushes amateur singers and knows their limitations (of which I have many).

Her website (ceciliamcdowall.co.uk) reveals that her works receive very many performances up and down the country, that she is prolific and that she is possibly the only composer to have received a commission from the Scott Polar Research Institute. (Its museum in Cambridge is small but fascinating.) She won eccentric fame after setting the text of the shipping forecast.

Missa Brevis – Tongues of Fire was first performed in a version for choir, brass and organ in 2000; McDowall produced a revised version for choir and organ three years ago and that’s the version we are learning.  As Donald has mentioned, it’s a mass for Whitsun rather than Christmas and includes a setting of Linguae Ignis (Tongues of Fire), a Pentecost text that inspired Peter Maxwell Davies to write a piece for solo cello and fourteen instruments in 2002.

(Maxwell Davies, always benignly smiling, died this year; I last saw him at the opening of a fine new hall in Saffron Walden in Essex. He had been commissioned to write a fanfare and trotted down to the platform for a bow wearing a big beam and one of his colourful waistcoats.)

Much of McDowall’s work has been recorded – but not, alas, Missa Brevis – Tongues of Fire but Steve Kleiser’s crib cd will be a great help in learning both the Mass and Donald’s Some Say…, a remarkable blend of Hamlet, the text of the Gloria and a passage from St Luke’s gospel. I’ve prepared by seeing Hamlet at Stratford, with a lively, intelligent performance by Paapa Essideu in the title role.

For his Fantasia on Christmas Carols (he wrote a lot of fantasias), Vaughan Williams drew on three folk tunes he and Cecil Sharp had collected. VW collected the first, This is the truth sent from above, from Ella Leather, a collector of Herefordshire songs; she had got it from Mr W Jenkins of Kings Pyon, near Weobley. The words are curiously literate but their ultimate source seems to be unknown.

The melody is known to old folkies like first bass Richard and me as Searching for Lambs, a courtship song that VW set for tenor and violin. It’s here, sung by Anthony Rolfe-Johnson:

 

Tony Rose, a great singer of the folk revival, described it “as near as one can get to the perfect folk song. When I say that it has a timeless quality about it, I mean that I cannot imagine a time when it would not give me pleasure to sing it.”

Here is Rose singing it:

 

Richard and I will gladly perform it during any choir tea break in return for a couple of chocolate digestives. Unlike most trad songs, the simple maid is not betrayed by some miserable deceiving male ratbag and it all ends happily:

For I am thine and thou art mine,
No man shall uncomfort thee.
We’ll join our hands in wedded bands
And married we will be.

I seem, as usual, to have wandered from the point, which is that all three melodies in the Fantasia are very fine and that we should enjoy performing them – as well as, in Donald’s piece, getting in our tribute to Shakespeare, three weeks before the end of celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of his death.

The novelist Margaret Atwood wrote, by the way, a wonderful alternative speech for Hamlet’s mum Gertrude. It tells her indecisive son:

You think what? You think Claudius murdered your Dad? Well, no wonder you’ve been so rude to him at the dinner table! If I’d known that, I could have put you straight in no time flat.
It wasn’t Claudius, darling.
It was me.

On that cynical note, goodbye.