Low Notes 6
By David Ward
January 2017. 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.
Happy new year and welcome to another choir session – a long one because Easter is so late.
Mind you, I’m still in last year and looking back to the Christmas concert in which I did not take part because of my dodgy knees. It was fascinating to sit in the audience and listen, hearing your committed singing – and realising that a lot of the bass sound goes straight up into the chancel roof of St Oswald’s and stays there.
Even better was having the chance to hear as a punter the two new works. This was a bit nerve-wracking, possibly worse than actually singing the stuff, because I knew what all the tricky bits were and was willing you to get past them. Which you did, with just the occasional very insignificant, barely perceptible slither. I already had some idea how both challenging and effective Cecilia McDowall’s mass was, especially the Linguae Ingnis motet, which had given me nightmares. But it was fine on the night and the Benedictus was a particular joy to hear.
And everyone rose to the drama of Donald’s tribute to Shakespeare – even the unsung acting at the beginning – and relished the big tune. He’s a clever chap.
Now we have three hefty works to look forward to. I was going to consult John Eliot Gardiner’s chunky biography of JS Bach for information about cantata 192 Nun danket alls Gott (Now thank we all our God) and pass it off as the result of my own scholarship. But all I found was that Eliot Gardiner refers in the book to pretty well every cantata except this one.
So all I know is cantata 192 is a bit peculiar because, as Donald said last week, it has only three movements – two hefty choruses sandwiching a duet – and some say it doesn’t really belong in the great man’s cantata cycle because no one knows how it was used in church. There is no autograph score, only a set of parts with a missing tenor line (tough luck, lads), which has been reconstructed.
The text is a hymn of thanks written (according to Wikipedia) about 1636 by Martin Rinkart, a Lutheran pastor, and is a setting of a passage from one of the more obscure books of the Apocrypha. Poor old Rinkart lived during the Thirty Years War in a city dogged by famine and plague. In 1637, he conducted as many as 50 funerals in a day (he must have worked fast) and a total of 4000 in the entire year including that of his wife. You do wonder what he had cause to be thankful about.
The tune was composed a bit later and Bach liked it, using it in four other cantatas.
Let God Arise is the 11th of the anthems Handel wrote while composer in residence in 1717-18 at Cannons, the grand Middlesex home of the 1st Duke of Chandos. As we found out in the first practice of the new year, the text is warlike, not so say thuggish. Lots of enemies are scatter’d in a flurry of flying semi-quavers and quite a lot a chariots and horses fall over, prompting repeated alleluias.
Schubert knocked off his Mass in G in a week in 1815, when he was just 17. (Don’t you just hate geniuses? So clever, so young…) “The intensity of this sacred arrangement is mainly found in its simplicity, the modest, personal experiencing of religious contemplation,” said one critic.
So there you are: quite a lot for us to get our collective head round. We seemed to do quite well with Handel in week one, which augurs well. But we could do with one or two extra tenors for April 9 so if you know anyone who can fly above an E natural with ease, please do some arm-twisting.
And sign up for our Shakespearean singing day on March 11, when we will take on choruses from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and A Shakespeare Ode by Thomas Linley. Please tell your friends. It will also be a chance to get a head start on the Linley pieces to be performed in our summer concert.
There are a lot of singing days about: the Barnby Choir is offering Music for the Resurrection on February 11; Salford Choral Society is having a go at Handel’s Israel in Egypt, also on February 11; and Prestbury Choral Society is doing the Mozart Requiem on February 18.
But our Shakespeare day takes precedence… Singing Day: Inspired by Shakespeare
That’s it; goodbye