Low Notes 16
By David Ward
May 2020: These you have loved: Choir members choose their favourite music
Thanks to everyone who sent ideas for Corona Island discs. It looks as if you had fun and perhaps moments of agonised indecision as you chose your five pieces and I’ve very much enjoyed sifting through each set and reading your succinct comments. (Mike Bell’s comments were not succinct for the best of reasons; more of that later.)
Reviewing the choices was like going into the home of someone you don’t know and scanning their bookshelves; you emerge with insights, with a better knowledge of the person behind the books.
Steve Thorpe, ex-cathedral chorister and ardent karaoke fan, went for Rocket Man by Elton John; Ian Ray came up with the Clyde Valley Stompers playing Prokofiev; and dark horse Donald Judge chose an arrangement of Jeepers Creepers; Liz Goodwin put Abba’s Dancing Queen and Nimrod from the Enigma Variations in adjacent slots (and what would Elgar have made of that?); Jenny Thorpe indulged her passion for the organ; Dot Graham had a memory of singing in Carnegie Hall (beat that) and Mary Halloran included Over the Rainbow, a number with which she made her solo debut at the age of six.
The collection presented many pieces I knew well, some I just knew and others I had never come across before but I am very glad I now have.
Bach topped the Bolly choir charts, with seven choices including three mentions of the Passions; Mozart followed with five choices (an opera, masses and a vespers); Beethoven with four (one opera, one string quartet, one sonata, one concerto). Coming up on the rails with two each were Elgar (a concerto and an Enigma variation), Shostakovich (two symphonies), Schubert (two song cycles), Mahler (a symphony and a single movement), Berlioz (a symphony and a huge opera) and outsider Jocelyn Pook (the only woman nominated), best known for her film scores.
No one mentioned Handel, Wagner, Vaughan Williams (I thought The Lark Ascending might have soared into the list), Haydn, Chopin, Verdi, Puccini or Dvorak. And Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Stockhausen all seem to have passed everyone by.
The non-classical pieces ranged widely form a folk tune loved by dancers, a duet between Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush (she who famously wuthered on a height), a 90s number that brings back happy memories, a hit from Hamilton and an album that prompted a teenage (and later) obsession.
My own dithering was lengthy and was still going on as I wrote the first draft of this. But I got there in the end.
Thank you for sending your choices and let’s, with luck, meet again in September. By which time you might have finished reading the 5000 or so words of the music list.
David