Low Notes 11
By David Ward
June 2018. 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.
Before, during and after our performance of Duruflé’s Requiem (and frequently in the shower), I kept singing to myself the plainsong version of the In Paradisum, which I last heard in the chapel of a small Benedictine monastery in Bedfordshire.
It was sung by nuns and monks as the coffin of a member of the order was wheeled away to its final resting place. The man inside the box was not your average kind of monk. He had been a small-time crook and was once hailed by the Sun as Britain’s most incompetent burglar.
While in jail, he had a vision of the Archangel Michael and turned to religion. He eventually wrote to several monasteries, asking permission to visit and stay. Only the head of the Bedfordshire monastery replied and the ex-con made his way there at the end of his sentence.
He stayed for several years and eventually had wished to become a monk. When he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, his wish was granted. We watched with him first as his robes were being prepared for his solemn profession and then as he took his final vows; he died just very soon afterwards.
So the In Paradisum evokes powerful memories, something music does so often.
As always in run-ups to our concerts, I have dire forebodings of disaster and the final Tuesday rehearsal in St Oswald’s intensified those fears. But by the Sunday rehearsal, we seemed to have got the hang of Duruflé; I could feel confidence in the air and was infected by it. My terrors faded and I began to enjoy myself.
But then another anxiety grew: good dress rehearsals often precede dodgy performances. That wasn’t so this time. The confidence of the afternoon did not fade; we went for it and, with only the odd tremor here and there, got away with it beautifully.
So thanks to all of you, to our soloists Olly, Steve and Mike, organist Ian and of course Maestro Donald who at times seemed to be willing us through that maze of ever-changing time signatures. And the good news is that the concert made a profit.
As I write, it is a mere 12 weeks to the first rehearsal of our new season when we will meet Charpentier, Buxtehude and the little-known Jiří Pavlica, whose Sanctus from the Missa Brevis we’ll sing at Christmas.
Pavlica is very prolific, with a hefty list of compositions and recordings. He seems to have worked mainly in the Czech Republic with Hradišťan, an ensemble that, it says here, “crosses the boundaries of musical genres and cooperates with celebrities of different cultures around the world”. (Pavlica has also collaborated with ace Northumbrian piper and concertina virtuoso Alistair Anderson, a name folkies among us will recognise).
We’ll be singing only the Sanctus of the Missa Brevis, which is a macoronic (a word I have always wanted to use somewhere) setting – it has text in both Latin and Czech. It’s very bright and lively; here’s a clip of it sung by a startlingly good school choir: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9y4L1Q2w5g
Pavlica himself says of his mass:
“We live in an age that is alternately praised and condemned for the boundless number of possibilities it offers, for its unrestricted freedoms and its moral relativism, its rational pragmatism and its exaggerated emotions… Today’s world has all this to offer, all these possible convictions and all this experience. And yet, subconsciously, what man needs is to seek, and find, those constant elements of order and harmony.
“I composed my Little Christmas Mass as a reminiscence of childhood, of a world of harmony, which, to the child, seemed never-ending, a world in which over everything there hung the cosmic arc of mother’s smile, a world of little feet crunching through crisp snow before daylight on their way to Advent morning service at the village church, of the magical glow of candles, the smell of burning incense, the singing of the womenfolk wrapped in their age-old woollen neckerchiefs, and the warmth, the most wonderful warmth on earth, that always lay waiting under the bedcovers to enclose the frost-nipped traveller again on his return home… all these things are the fragments of a child’s Advent and Christmas, constants representative of stability, permanence, harmony…”
That’s something to think about as you get your heads round the notes. And the Czech.
The season is going to be interesting (and fun) because of our opera night for the Bolly festival and a performance of Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo by Michael Flanders and Joseph Horowitz (whose jazz harpsichord concerto I seem to remember hearing at its first performance in London in 1965; don’t ask me to hum it). Rope in any singers you can and bring them, if necessary kicking and screaming, to our first practice on September 11. We need some beef for those opera choruses.
This year the committee has come up with something new: a singing morning at the Arts Centre on Saturday October 13. The idea that we gather to sing without any performance pressure shorter pieces that are not hugely demanding and cover a wide range of styles; the simple aim is to have a few hours of singing for fun. Nothing is fixed yet but the menu could include such things as a Victorian part song, a madrigal, a polyphonic motet and a stomping number from the American Sacred Harp tradition with which I am mildly obsessed: the tradition includes a tune called Bollington.
We’ll explain more in September. Meanwhile please stick the date in your diaries, enjoy a wonderful summer and thanks for all your support in 2017-18.
David