London Oriana becomes London Owliana at the BBC Electric Proms

How can I possibly do justice to our appearance with Robert Plant and the Band of Joy at the Electric Proms last night? It was brill! They were fantastic and it was a privilege to be able to join them for a couple of numbers in the encore. The culmination of a pretty hectic week of rehearsals almost every night, artistic tension, laughter, tears, and a really rather nice fish pie in the BBC canteen.

The tension mostly derived from some last minute cuts to what we were doing. David-the-Conductor had as usual put together an impressive and ambitious arrangement of three pieces that we’d been asked to look at – Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down, Twelve Gates to the City, and I Bid You Goodnight. But in rehearsals on Thursday with the band, it was decided that Satan had to come in the main set rather than the encore, and we would pretty much have had to do a synchronised pole vault on and off the stage in order to join in. So regretfully our accompanying parts to Satan had to be dropped, which was a real shame. In addition, once we’d run through the other two, the feeling was that some of the words the choir was singing were clashing a little bit with the band’s lyrics, so we also had to drop a few bars here and there, and also some lyrics in favour of oooohs and ahhhhs. Now, you might think we couldn’t get the lyrics wrong with oooohs and ahhhhhhhs, but let me tell you, you’d be wrong! There were many occasions when half the choir was ooohing while the other half was ahhhing, and we’d all grown so used to coming in strongly with “Twelve gates!” that every single one of us ended up singing “Tw-ooooooh” at least once. It was like the Owl Chorus. There was also the added complication that some bars were dropped or truncated, so we were suddenly coming in on different notes to what we’d learned. And on top of all that, we found at sound-check on Friday that we were all individually miked, and standing further apart between rows than we were expecting. So we couldn’t hear much of ourselves, the rest of the choir or even the band, and we were picking up the pitch once it had resounded off the walls, which is not the most reliable way to stay in tune. The soundcheck was therefore a little tense. “Aaaaa—oooooooh”, sang Emma next to me, a minor third too high. “Tw-ooooo” I warbled back at her, at least a semitone flat. We exchanged panicked glances while David-the-Conductor glowered and Robert Plant somehow managed to maintain a zen-like calm. It was not a high point of our day.

This could have been upsetting for a lesser choir, but happily we are the Oriana, and if there’s one thing we’re used to, it’s pulling off a performance when we’re not completely familiar with the pieces! At least I remembered rehearsing these numbers, and I haven’t always been able to say that in a concert. So we maintained our equanimity with some hastily planned semaphore signals on the part of David-the-Conductor so that we knew when to ooooh and when to ahhhhh. And of course, once the concert had kicked off and we heard how amazing Robert and the band were sounding, we were riding high on adrenalin and bopping like teenagers in the wings. Come the encore we filed on to a cheerful and raucous crowd who were clearly really enjoying themselves and welcomed us with warmth and appreciation. We had a lot to live up to, but I feel like we did the band credit. We ran through Twelve Gates first, and our inner backing singers burst through, oooohing and aaaahing like we’d been born to it. Not a tw-ooooooo in sight. And then came I Bid You Goodnight, in a stunning a capella arrangement. The Band of Joy sang first, and then we joined in with some gorgeous harmonies. It felt sublime, and by the reaction we had from the crowd, it sounded as stunning as it felt. It was a truly amazing experience, and I really hope we’ll get to sing with Robert again soon. And as an added bonus, a few of us walked into Jo Wiley in the corridor afterwards, and she said the performance was something special – praise indeed from someone that hears an awful lot of music.

So in the spirit of last night’s concert, I’m going to write the rest of the blog without words.

Ooooooooh
Aaaaaaaaaaah
Tw-oooooooooooo
Good night!

From Shakespeare to Robert Plant

“I want to congratulate you on a fantastic concert last week” said David-the-conductor at rehearsal this week. “It was nice to do a concert where you all actually knew the music”. What can we say? It’s true. We do a lot of concerts, and it’s rare that we have enough rehearsal time to learn all the music to the same depth, so Oriana concerts are always an exciting mix of bliss and terror. Last week the bliss was firmly in charge, but really we were cheating because it was a repeat of a concert that we’d already sung in 2009. The terror is ready to get its own back though. In our heightened levels of confidence, we’ve decided to really challenge ourselves by learning all the pieces for our performance next week by heart. Oriana is going ELECTRIC, baby, and how could we possibly get in touch with our inner rock gods if we’re all clutching black ring-binders stuffed full of sheet music? So we’re dumping our folders – rock on! Next thing you know we’ll be drinking shandy and penning fake skull-and-crossbones tattoos on each others arms. Oriana – London’s most dangerous choir!

So it’s the Electric Proms next Friday and as I mentioned a couple of weeks back, we will be appearing on stage for a couple of numbers with the lovely Robert Plant and his Band of Joy. That’s their name, not just my description. I wonder how joyous they are in real life? I’m expecting big grins and happiness galore next week, or I’ll sue for false advertising. But even if they’re actually a bit dour, we’re still going to have loads of fun singing lustily away at the back. We had a go through two of the pieces we’re singing at rehearsal this week, and they’re both very interesting and completely different to each other in style. There are a couple of solo bits in one of the songs, and we had our usual moment of looking really hard at the floor when David-the-Conductor asked for volunteers. But it turns out David has a new strategy to manage this. Fiona-the-choir-chair foolishly smoothed back her hair, only to discover she’d inadvertently volunteered for a solo by raising her hand above shoulder level. Yikes. From now on I’m keeping my hands in my pockets at all times and turning pages with my nose.

Sops, shall I compare thee to the alto section? Thou art much shriller, and more numerous

It was our Shakespeare concert this week, and a good time was had by all in the choir and hopefully all in the audience too. There really was some fabulous music on the programme, and we felt like we did most of it justice. After last week’s soloist despair for the Gardner, the sops did all end up singing the O Mistress Mine solo in unison, which was a relief. The Gardner Shakespeare Sequence is definitely a piece to make us all long for safety in numbers, and luckily that wasn’t a problem for the sops as there are simply loads of us. (In fact the biggest challenge of the night was fitting us all on the stage. Second-row-Emma-and-Kath were actually singing from the wings for a while). But generally the Gardner went much better than some of us had been fearing. Under the Greenwood Tree I remember being a particular shambles when we last performed it, but this time we got it bang on. Lots of the other pieces really came together too. Applebaum’s Witches Blues was good enough that we were in danger of enjoying it too much – we were belting it out like a big band in the afternoon rehearsal, until David-the-Conductor pointed out that were singing about birth-strangl’d babes so perhaps the big grins and jazz hands weren’t so appropriate. Hopefully we nastied it up enough for the concert. The Vaughan Williams and the Mäntyjärvi were probably the most challenging pieces on the programme, but from the stage it felt like we got the spirit of them, if possibly not quite all of the notes. All in all we were pretty happy with how it went, and I confess to being even more happy that there’s no more Gardner on the programme for the rest of the year. We’re on Gardning leave.

So I have decided to START A RUMOUR that Jaakko Mäntyjärvi was in the audience. If you are in the choir or were at the concert, I urge you to join me in spreading this to those who don’t read the blog. Please say “oh yes, I saw him, he was the tallish shortish oldish youngish guy with lightish darkish hair sitting in the front near the back”. I was actually sure I’d spotted him in the audience for a while, but before you put too much faith in that assertion, bear in mind that I don’t know what he looks like and I also saw Stacey from EastEnders and my dead grandfather. But there was definitely someone there who looked a bit Finnish, so that’s good enough evidence for me.

Going solo

As I predicted on last week’s blog, we were subjected to an extreme Gardning session this week, as John Gardner’s Shakespeare Sequence took up a goodly part of the Wednesday rehearsal. And as usual with Gardner, carnage reigned for a while, but harmony finally prevailed. The source of much of the angst was O Mistress Mine, which contains a suggested soprano solo. Personally I find singing solos very very scary indeed. In fact, one of the joys of being in a choir is that I get to hide among the crowd and make music in a team. There’s no “I” in choir! Oh. Anyway, last time we sang this piece no-one was brave enough to volunteer for the solo, which has some tricky rhythms, so we all sang it together. This time, David-the-Conductor asked me if I’d have a bash at it, but when I looked at the music I discovered that last time I’d not only crossed out an entire page in huge heavy pencil, but also written in capital letters at the top “STOP SINGING! YOU’LL F*** IT UP!” This was not a good sign. So when it came time to rehearse this piece, I did what any wimp would do and asked to be let off. David-the-conductor fixed us all with his beadiest eye and asked for another volunteer. We all looked at the floor and shuffled our feet. It would be fair to say that David-the-Conductor was not impressed with our lack of heroism, and he expressed this loudly and clearly for quite some time before a few brave souls finally threw themselves on their swords and gave it a go. I would like to publicly thank those who stood up in our hour of need and saved the face, and the nerves, of the entire section. We in the Sops salute you!

The scary Gardner notwithstanding, it is shaping up to be a seriously fantastic concert and I enjoyed choir this week more than I have for a long time. Which is good, because we got a double dose. On Thursday we had our first rehearsal for another exciting performance only two weeks after the Shakespeare concert. I’m proud to say that for the first time, Oriana have sold out the Roundhouse! Well, I suppose technically, it’s Robert Plant that’s sold out the Roundhouse. But we know secretly that Oriana is the real draw. Yes indeed, we are once again lucky enough to be joining Robert Plant onstage, and this time it’s for the BBC Electric Proms, which we’re really looking forward to. We sang with Robert earlier this year at Abbey Road Studios, and it was a fantastic experience. David-the-Conductor has been working night and day on some new arrangements and we had our first sing-through last night at the BBC studios in Maida Vale. We have to sing from memory, so there’s lots of hard work to do between now and the performance. But one of the pieces is so catchy that I’ve been singing it all morning and will definitely know it by heart by the time of the concert. As will all my work colleagues, the people on my train in the morning and the lady in the porridge stand at Marylebone station.