Low Notes 17
By David Ward
May 2022. This is the latest (and about time too) 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.
As I was saying, before we were so rudely interrupted by Covid, the singing goes on.
Since coming back to life after more than 18 horribly empty and scary months, the choir has given two concerts and sung at a carol service at St Oswald’s.
There are not yet as many of us as there used to be. About 35 members performed Brahms’s German Requiem a few weeks ago; pre-Covid, there might have been 50-60 singers. We are aware that Covid has not been an easy time for anyone and many, including choir members, still do not feel ready to return to something like life as it was. But we’d like you to know that we will welcome you back with socially-distanced open arms whenever you wish to come to the Arts Centre on a Tuesday night.
For those who have not been able to return yet, here’s the story so far. Regular rehearsals began again last September after a period of plunging infections but almost as soon as we opened our mouths to sing our first collective note, numbers began to soar again. We kept going, protected as far as possible by precautions devised by the committee. Everyone walked into the building wearing a mask, sanitised their hands and walked directly to designated seats, set at least a metre apart (which made it difficult for me to sponge notes off far more competent basses).
All windows and doors were kept open and the hall became distinctly chilly as autumn turned into winter. Steve Thorpe, caught in a draught, often pulled up his hood to protect his ears from frostbite. I wore thermals but my feet trembled at the imminent prospect of hypothermia. A collective sense of determination drove us on. We melded again as a choir but could not mingle – there was no break, no tea, no chat. We all missed that social interaction, just as we had through the darkest days of lockdowns.
But to sing together again was a joy; after an enforced break, we were returning to the familiar routine of note-bashing and learning again how a bunch of individuals can become an ensemble. And eventually, we prepared to pull on our White Nancy badges and black clobber to perform before an audience again (albeit not a very large one). I had problems with my M&S slim-fit black shirt: when I went to the wardrobe, I couldn’t find it then dimly remembered that I had decided to buy another. I ordered a shirt from M&S but it seemed to pass through several continents before arriving far too late for the concert; I sang in a dark navy zip-neck sweater and hoped that I would not be censured by the committee.
And so to the future and a concert of two requiems on June 12. We have now started rehearsing Dvořák’s Requiem, which had its second performance in Manchester in October 1892. (Its first was the previous year, the result of a commission by the Birmingham Festival, but we needn’t take much notice of what went in that upstart town.) Its first Czech performances followed and one review enthused: “Only he whom music has permitted to glimpse the innermost meanders of the human heart, he who, instinctively or unconsciously, is guided by his inspiration to create something beautiful and precious – only he can speak the language of music with such conviction.”
Dvorak himself said of the piece: “I have taken great pains again to go one step further, or perhaps more, than I did, say, in the Stabat Mater or in some of my other longer works.”
Quite something to live up to as we confront the notes on a Tuesday night.
I have a happy memory of buying, about 40 years ago, a two-cassette Czech version of the Requiem in the Bontempi record shop in a basement off Wenceslas Square in Prague. Is the shop still there? Donald will probably know.
Our concert also includes the Requiem in F minor by the splendidly named Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (1644-1704), one of Mozart’s principal predecessors musical factotum to the Archbishop of Salzburg, for whom the piece was almost certainly composed sometime after 1692. A new recording that was released just about a year ago describes it as “a work of plangent beauty and kaleidoscopic colours, timbres and textures”. That suits us – we’re pretty good at plangent beauty.
During my researches on Biber (do you think I really know all this stuff?), Wikipedia kept asking me if I meant Bieber. As in Justin.
A final useful piece of information: the Tatton Singers in Knutsford are featuring Dyson’s Canterbury Pilgrims in a singing day on May 14. Full details at Tatton Singers Singing Day
That’s it. Happy singing.
David