Low Notes 2
By David Ward
April 2016 This is the second in an occasional 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.
That spring concert was fun. From my perspective (up the back and almost inside the vestry), it seemed to get better as the night wore on. I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped in the Charpentier Te Deum, which I had very much enjoyed in rehearsals, not least because it suited my not very high level of competence.
Wachet Auf was wonderful and challenging. We seemed to zip through the opening chorus with a lot of confidence, the tenors strode heroically to the front and went for it, and the final chorale was hairs-on-the-back of-the-neck moving. And Messiah was pure delight, a mix of easy familiarity and Handelian traps for the unwary (which of course I fell into).
I went home knackered but happy.
The choir layout in the St Oswald’s is not the best – I could hear the tenors nicely but the elegant sounds of the altos and sopranos were heading more in the direction of the Cock and Pheasant than they were towards me. Other possible layouts are now under discussion.
We’re underway again, heading for the concert in June. I’m in my usual state of despair, feeling I’ll never get the hang of the stuff in this programme. John Rutter’s repeated death thwacks for timpani at the opening of his Requiem instil deep thoughts of doom. But I’m working on it but I still tremble at a flurry of accidentals.
Despite having sung it twice before, I seem to have forgotten Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine, which Wikipedia tells me he wrote when he was only 19. This Racine, by the way, is the same one as that French dramatist who wrote impenetrable tragedies in rhyming alexandrine couplets.
I’m also having problems with Faure’s Pavanne – great tune, ludicrous text. Myrtle and co go from being queens of our hearts to tyrants of our hearts in fewer than 18 lines. La cadence est moins lente in the seventh line sounds like a Donald cry as he bans rallentandos; and I wonder if Qu’ils sont fols! Airs coquets! might be interpreted as a cruel slur on hard-working tenors.
But I’m in serious training for the bottom E flats kindly offered by both Fauré and Duruflé, whose Ubi Caritas I think I will very much enjoy once I have learned to count. (3/4 to 4/4 to 5/8 to 2/4 in consecutive bars; don’t push your luck, Maurice.)
2016-17 season
Details have now been finalised for our next three concerts, with a typically eclectic mix of pieces based very much on our latest round of suggestions.
December 4 2016: St Oswald’s.
An English Christmas
Cecilia McDowall: Missa Brevis Tongue of Fire
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on Christmas Carols
Donald Judge: a new work setting a text from Hamlet
Carols by English composers.
April 9 2017: St Oswald’s
Let God Arise
JS Bach: Cantata BWV 192
Schubert: Mass in G
Handel: Chandos Anthem Let God Arise
Solo items
June 11: Arts Centre
Shakespearean Shenanigans
Thomas Linley Junior: two choruses from A Shakespeare Ode
Purcell: Excerpts from The Fairy Queen
Vaughan Williams: In Windsor Forest
Shakespearean solos from choir members
Saturday March 11: Arts Centre Singing Day: Celebrating Shakespeare
The programme will feature both the Linley choruses and The Fairy Queen. A good preparation for summer.
You may notice that our tributes to Shakespeare in the year that marks the 400th anniversary of his death begin as everyone else will have finished. The committee would like you to know that this is deliberate policy; there is no truth in cynical rumours that we failed to notice that 2016 was a big year for the Bard. The Fairy Queen is loosely based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and In Windsor Forest on The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Thomas Linley died at 23, not long after composing, with his father Thomas, The Duenna, an opera with a libretto by Richard Brinsley Sheridan – who had previously eloped with Elizabeth, sister to young T and daughter of old T; she was an accomplished singer.
Footnotes:
Back to this year: I noticed that John Rutter’s Requiem had its first complete performance on 13 October 1985 at Lovers’ Lane United Methodist Church, Dallas, Texas. I’m more impressed by the venue than the première. “Lover’s Lane”: is that the kind of name stern John Wesley would have approved of for a Methodist church?
There is talk of a sociable day out in the summer. Perhaps a bit of a church crawl with lunch in a pub. Let me know if you fancy the idea.
Emily Howard, Bollington resident and my near neighbour, is to have Torus, a new 20-minute work performed at this year’s Proms by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Vasily Petrenko. A torus, by the way is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three-dimensional space about an axis coplanar with the circle. So now you now….
April 2016