Can I take it to the bridge? Oriana flood the Ponte Vecchio

“I’ve had enough of this relationship,” said the young Italian girl, grumpily. “All the romance is gone.”

“But darling,” insisted her paramour. “What could be more romantic? It is midnight on the Ponte Vecchio, in beautiful moonlight, and …”

“Oh my giddy aunt, you’ve even hired a choir!” exclaimed the girl. “What an effort! You shall now proceed to second base.”

At least, this is how I like to imagine the conversation went when the London Oriana Choir sneaked up behind a canoodling couple on Florence’s most famous bridge, and burst into “If Ye Love Me”. We serenaded them mercilessly before melting away into the night like singing ninjas. And we didn’t stop there.

We proceeded on round the sleeping city like a stealth choir, filling the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti with beautiful drunken sound for the benefit of two surprised American tourists. We were aiming for the famous Boboli Gardens, but on finding the gate closed we had to settle for the next nearest patch of grass, which happened to be the roundabout in the middle of the Piazza Romana.

The occasional car tooted as we wailed our way through the introduction to Bob Applebaum’s Witches Song.

“Roundabout, roundabout, the traffic goes….”

We shrieked as one of our party climbed the modernist statue in the middle of the traffic island (which, weirdly, was a statue of someone planking on someone else’s head), we shushed each other even more loudly than we shrieked, and the neighbours finally had enough and called the police.

Several of us scarpered like cockroaches as the police car pulled up, leaving those too drunk to move to carry the can. Colin-the-tenor, with impressive sang-froid, wandered across to them with a bottle of wine tucked elegantly in his top pocket.

“What would the police in your country do at this point?” asked the lovely Italian policeman.

“They’d ask us to go home now,” said Colin, cleverly avoiding the “they’d arrest us” pitfall, but missing a golden opportunity to ask the police for a lift to the nearest off-licence.

So hey ho, another Oriana foreign tour, another brush with the police. I’m sure there’s something else important about this tour that I should include in the blog, though.  What could it be?  Oh yes of course, that’s right, we also did a couple of concerts. 

We sang in the Duomo in San Gimignano, a really beautiful church with a deeply resonant acoustic, and then were lucky enough to also sing in Santo Spirito church in Florence, just round the corner from the Ponte Vecchio.  Two really amazing venues, and I’m pleased to say we did them both proud with plenty (and I do mean plenty) of fantastic music.

In fact, I shall always remember this tour for being the only time, in my whole history with Oriana, that I have heard the following phrase pass David-the-Conductor’s lips (and I warn all stalwart Orianites to sit down before you read this, it’s a shocker):

“There’s too much music.  We’ll have to drop some pieces.”

Stagger.  Seriously, David-let’s-squeeze-in-another-encore-Drummond was beseeching US to drop some music.  It was very true though, we had folders-full of sheet music riotously bouncing through the golden Tuscan sunrises.  At our pre-tour rehearsal, David had announced his intention to sing through all the pieces on his tentative list and decide which ones to take and which to leave.  Well, you can guess what happened.  Every single piece made it on to the list, despite some of us (okay, one of me) loudly shouting “NO!” to everything. (I confess I’d accidentally had a glass of wine before rehearsal, and may not have been in my soberest state). 

But we sing so much wonderful music, and every piece had ardent fans fighting for its inclusion.  So, in yet another demonstration of why democracy is a flawed system of rule, on tour came pretty much every piece we’ve sung over the last five years.  And we determinedly whittled our way through them.  We sang Allain’s “Christ’s Love Song”, even though there were barely enough of us for one to a part.  We sightread our way through Kats-Chernin’s fearsome “Stabat Mater” (at least, I did).  We made up the words to Orban’s “Daemon”, deciding a prudent focus on getting the right notes would serve us better than worrying about correct diction.  (“Just sing anything vaguely Latin-sounding, no-one will know”, we agreed, entirely forgetting that we were in Italy.)  And we soared through our best rendition ever of Whitacre’s “Leonardo Dreams”. 

Old time Oriana favourites by Byrd, Tallis and Purcell also made it in to both programmes, and we sang them superbly.  Tallis’ “If Ye Love Me (plank on my head)” became the symbol of Florence, at least for me.  And I can’t think of a more beautiful piece for a more beautiful city, or a more beautiful choir.  (In sound, anyway!)  It was a fabulous tour, and I’d like to thank each and every one of my tour compadres for making it so.  In fact, I think we should go on tour again right away.  Who’s up for a trip to Spaghetti Junction?

What can I say about Saturday's concert? No, seriously, what can I say?

It has oft been said that Oriana is a choir not for the faint-hearted, and last Saturday’s concert definitely proved that rule.  In triple spades with a trump and a twenty-one and a royal flush on top. 

Picture the scene: it’s the week before the concert.  We’re singing two really rather difficult modern pieces for choir and solo sax, and we’ve managed to get John Harle, one of the world’s top saxophonists, to come and play the sax for us.  On top of that, he wrote one of the pieces, so he’s pretty likely to notice if we’re a touch out, a bar behind him, singing in entirely the wrong key etc.  We could reasonably be expected to concentrate more on getting his piece right, to the slight detriment of the other sax piece, except that we’ve ALSO invited the composer of THAT one to come and hear us sing it.  We’re still note-bashing both pieces. 

We’ve had very little time to practice the beautiful but complex Madrigali by Lauridsen, so those of us who’ve sung them before are largely relying on memory, and the newer members are miming.  We’ve just been handed an entirely new piece to learn, arranged by our very own David-the-Conductor, and it’s a David Drummond special – starting off quite simply and then suddenly going off into an entirely unexpected key, just to trip us up!  We’re singing Whitacre’s Leonardo and we’re tumming when we should be la-ing.  And SOME of us (ie me) have just discovered we’re going to be playing the finger cymbals as well.

 

And right now, we’re learning that what we thought was a reasonably straightforward Gibbons piece is going to be sung by many and varied solo voices instead of the entire choir.  We’re all shaking, not being used to solos, and those not selected for a solo think they’re going to get off easy.  But David, being the inclusive conductor that he is, has just written four pages of extra music for those people, so that they don’t feel left out.  We’re juggling not one, not two, but THREE separate scores while we attempt to learn this piece, and we’re about to discover that we’re not going to just sing it, we’re going to perform it as street theatre.  We have a week to source a medieval apothecary costume (me again), practice a cockney accent, and figure out how to wave a pestle and mortar at the audience without losing our place in the score. 

Anyone else sensing some raised eyebrows at this point?

Well what can I say?  Oriana once again pulled it off.  We unfortunately started with the Gibbons, which we just about managed to avoid being a total car crash.  I may not have been the most medieval of apothecaries in my GlaxoSmithKline lab coat, but I managed to offer people aqua vitae in a convincingly Cockerney accent.  Colin-the-fishwife looked most fetching in his sou’wester, and Lucy-the-milkmaid was wearing more cow-themed items than I thought the world could hold.  Greengrocer’s aprons paraded throughout Southwark Cathedral, and many of the audience went home with a bonus cabbage.  And you can’t say that about many concerts, can you?

Anyway, once the excruciating embarrassment of the Gibbons was over, the rest of the concert was pretty fine.  The sax pieces were glorious and moving (despite a couple of hairy moments) and the Whitacre “Leonardo” was fun and precise.  And I am overwhelmed by our ability to remember the Lauridsen Madrigali.  They were a triumph.  Once again the choir has proved how good we really are.  Well done fellow choristers, I salute you!

So another Oriana concert safely in the bag.  It was all too easy really.  Next time we should get all the music on the day of the concert, simultaneously translate it into Swahili and stand on our heads the whole time.  Now THAT’s what I call a challenge.

Ooooh, saxy!

What do London and Florence have in common?

 1) They’re both cities in the northern hemisphere.
 2) They have a wealth of culture, art and glorious music under their belts.
 3) Hitting someone on the head with a fish will not make you popular in either. And
 4) they are, together, the subject of Oriana’s next concert.

 It’s to be a celebration of these two marvellous cities, a programme in no way contrived to shamelessly curry audience favour when we go on tour to Florence at the beginning of June.

 On the setlist we have a couple of Oriana repertoire stalwarts – Leonardo Dreams by Whitacre and the fabulous Madrigali by Lauridsen – hurray! And then a welter of new music, all modern, all a bit complicated, and some of it saxophone-based. Which is lucky, because otherwise John Harle would only get to stand at the front and look pretty when he joins us on stage at the next concert.

 I’ve only seen John Harle once before, when I turned up on a whim at a little-advertised concert in the wilds of Leicestershire to find him tootling a few tunes, accompanied unexpectedly on the piano by Richard Rodney Bennett. So I’m very excited to see him again, when I can fawn upon him in a manner that more befits such a famous saxophonist. And to set myself up for proper John Harle fawning opportunities, I’ve been reading all about him on his website. Did you know he wrote the theme tune for “Silent Witness”? I LOVE that theme tune! I mean, obviously it’s not in the same league as my all time favourite TV theme tune ever - Mr Ben - but it’s not far off.

Other exciting John Harle facts: he is the world’s most recorded saxophonist (says his website). He was a clarinettist in the Band of the Coldstream Guards (Wikipedia, that one). He was born on the same day as Matti Häyry, Professor of Bioethics and Philosophy of Law at the University of Manchester (that was just random googling).

And if all that wasn't versatile enough for you, I found out the following exciting fact from his website: “his activities have taken him from the Last Night of the BBC Proms and the podium of the London Symphony Orchestra to the boardrooms of major international organisations.”

 I was overcome! On top of being the world’s most recorded saxophonist, John Harle also runs some major international organisations! Do his talents know no bounds? I can just see him bouncing into a boardroom, sax in hand, shouting “Buy coffee! Sell dotcom shares! Clean up that oilspill!” Or maybe, just maybe, he never actually says anything, and instead he expresses his orders to his minions through an impromptu saxophone solo.

Well, with this in mind, I’m looking at his “City Solstice” in a whole new light. It masquerades as a piece inspired by the history of London Bridge, but when you look carefully, it actually contains coded messages to all of John Harle’s acolytes in the City of London.

 “Dance over my Lady Lee” - buy property in the Lee River Valley.
 “Gold and silver, pen and ink” - invest in Bic. And
 “Who is there to count the cost? My fair lady” - hire me an attractive new accountant.

 Get your tickets for the concert now, and bring a notebook. You never know what get-rich-quick tips you might pick up.

Concert schmoncert. There are far more important things afoot!

Fine though the music we’re currently singing is, and much as the concert on March 30th means to us, I’m afraid it all pales into insignificance next to the far more important issue currently occupying Orianan minds: who will be the next choir chair?

After many years of sterling service to the cause of keeping the London Oriana Choir in good voice and solid drinking opportunities, our esteemed co-chairs Fiona and Simon have decided to take their final bow and retire to the back row of the chorus. Welcome back to the ranks of giggling, note-passing, pencil-forgetting sinners, Fiona and Simon! But someone needs to take on the mantle of keeping us all in check and sorting out concerts for us, and a couple of weeks ago our outgoing chairs gave an impassioned, twenty minute long joint plea for someone else to stand forward and take the reins. A ringing silence filled the room at the end, and some tumbleweed rolled past. It wasn’t looking good.

However, those in the know say that at least two possible teams of candidates have now thrown their hats in the ring, so it looks like Oriana will indeed continue and we might actually have enough interest in the position to run a vote! I simply can’t imagine it. Will we have hustings? Policy documents? Will it be a secret vote or public? Will it be decided by a sing-off? Can we vote them off one-by-one? I can’t wait!

To help anyone who may still be wavering about whether to put themselves forward, I thought it might be useful to take a look at the good old interweb and see if I could find some tips about what might be required. The entire interweb seems mysteriously silent about how to run a choir. But leadership qualities are probably the same no matter what the task – right? Working on this basis, Greenstein, Rogoff, Olsen and Co (my go-to source in such matters) mention the following qualities that make a good leader.

“A good leader has an exemplary character.” Ah, well that cuts out the entire choir already, shady bunch that we are. So maybe we’ll just overlook that one and move on to number 2.

“A good leader is enthusiastic about their work or cause.” I think most of us could fulfil that 95% of the time – just don’t make me sing any John Gardiner or songs about rainbows and I’m there.

A good leader is able to think analytically.” Hmm, but what exactly does this statement MEAN? Let’s break it down into parts…

“Good leaders are tolerant of ambiguity” – Ambiguity? I’m afraid I don’t know his music, but I’m sure I can tolerate it if necessary.

“A good leader is confident.” I, ladies and gentlemen, assert with confidence that I would be a GREAT choir chair.

Well look at that – I’m the obvious choice. I’m now officially declaring myself as a candidate. As it happens I am also running for American President, but that’s okay, I can do both. In fact, to save on time I think I’ll just use the same manifesto – it’ll probably fit perfectly with the odd tweak here and there. So here are my election pledges:

• Free healthcare and sheet music for everyone with an income lower than mine. (Before you get excited about this, bear in mind I work in the charity sector)
• A fixed, 20 minute long tea break in the middle of every rehearsal - and a harbour shall be provided for people to pour the dregs into.
• By the end of the year we will have invaded Iran and forced them to adopt a new democratic system. I mean, diatonic system.
• Extended drinking hours in all pubs, so that we always have time to get squiffy after a concert no matter how many encores David-the-Conductor makes us do.
• And finally, the opportunity to vote on every piece of music selected for a concert. “No harmonisation without representation.”

There you are. Clearly the perfect candidate. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m just off to pitch myself for England manager.

The unknown history of Scarlatti

Now that the Christmas CD is in the bag, we’ve finally kissed Christmas goodbye and moved on to the music for the next concert, which is a concert largely of Stabat Maters. Did you know there are actually two versions of the medieval Stabat Mater text? The “Stabat Mater dolorosa” is all about Mary’s suffering when Jesus is being crucified, and the “Stabat Mater speciosa” is a joyful text about the nativity. For a moment, when I discovered this, I had a suspicion that David-the-Conductor had found a sneaky way to extend Christmas EVEN LONGER by doing a nativity-themed concert in March, but it turned out we are actually singing versions of the dolorosa, so phew, Easter is on the way. Bring on the eggs.

The concert comprises three Stabat Maters by Scarlatti, Palestrina and Kats-Chernin (of Lloyds bank advert “oh oh oh ohhhh, oh oh, oh oh oh ohhhhh, oh oh” fame). We were going to do a fourth, but there was a “technical issue” (in this context, the phrase “technical issue” means “the problem was fully explained to me and the rest of the choir at break, but I was busy coveting my neighbour’s cup of tea and therefore can’t remember a word of the explanation”) so we had to drop that piece. So, with a little bit of space in the running order, we’ve pushed the boat out and crammed an entire requiem mass into the programme too. You certainly get your money’s worth at an Oriana concert. Happily, it’s Faure’s Requiem, which is an absolutely glorious piece, so the technical issue has worked out well.
We’ve been concentrating a lot on the Domenico Scarlatti Stabat Mater, which is beautiful and somewhat complex. Jurgen Jurgens, who wrote the forward to our edition, tells us that the “discriminately organised doublechoir writing manages to combine the old, strictly handled contrapuntal technique with a motivically almost deliquescent modern melodic style.” Got that everyone? Make sure you get that into all your conversations with your friends when you’re talking about the concert – the ticket sales will simply soar.

But there’s some quite interesting information bundled up in the forest of words too. No-one’s sure when the Stabat Mater was written, but it was certainly relatively early in his career, while his father – famed composer Alessandro Scarlatti - was still alive. And this is a surprise, because Domenico suffered from Overbearing Parent Syndrome, being expected to become a musician from birth and to compose the kind of music his father wrote. But the Stabat Mater is very different from the other music he was writing at the time, so he probably wrote it secretly, in dead of night, hiding the manuscript in opera librettos and up the chimney so Alessandro wouldn’t stumble across it. Barry Creasey, the Chairman of the Collegium Musicum of London, says that Domenico was entirely dominated by his father until the age of 32, when he was legally emancipated. Good grief. When his father finally died, Scarlatti breathed a sigh of relief, threw the only copies of his last four operas into the fire (I’m guessing) and refused to write anything that wasn’t for harpsichord for the rest of his life.

Handel, born the same year, had completely the opposite problem. His father was so against him being a musician that he had to smuggle a harpsichord into the attic and stuff live mice inside to dampen the sound of the strings (again, I’m guessing). So this leads me to the obvious conclusion that Scarlatti and Handel were accidentally swapped at birth. There’s definitely a PhD thesis in that.

Inevitably, for two such star-crossed musicians, they soon met and hated each other on sight, each suffering from the certainty that their respective fathers preferred the other (I have now moved from the realm of “guesswork” into “complete lies”, by the way). But they pretended to be good friends, and instead of outright warfare they carried on a campaign of secret intimidation, sleeping with each other’s wives, doctoring each other’s manuscripts with jazz harmonies, and secretly putting salt into each others’ entries into the Roman Women’s Institute Baking Competition.

Things came to a head when they were encouraged to face each other in a keyboard duel … to the DEATH!!! At high noon they met. Scarlatti unholstered his impressively large harpsichord, and struggled to show no emotion when Handel turned up wheeling an organ. The music began; semi-quavers peppered the air and every escape route was barred by a tierce de Picardie. Handel pulled out all the stops (little organ joke there) but Scarlatti was voted the better … harpsichordist. The judging panel then hastily awarded Handel the “Best Organist” prize, before running off down the street shouting “everyone’s a winner, it’s just a matter of finding your strengths” before raiding the Department of Education and forcing through a bloody reorganisation of the GCSE marking criteria. Left alone, Handel and Scarlatti shrugged and went to the pub for a Peroni, and their lifelong enmity was finally laid to rest.

Well I think that’s enough nonsense for this blog entry. Next time: A full rundown of how Palestrina discovered America.

PS the Handel/Scarlatti keyboard duel is actually true.

Oriana goes on record, and Christmas finally ends

Last weekend Oriana went on a religious retreat. For hours we stood together, in silence, heads bowed, praying that God would send us the light. The little red light that signified “we are now recording”. And when God spaketh unto us, through the Holy Speaker of Gentle Criticism, it was in a mellifluous, timeless BBC voice. Dimbleby-esque, in fact, as you would expect from a deity. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that God was actually called Alex, looked about 19 and was (annoyingly for one so young) a top producer for Decca. A God for our times, I think.

The bulk of Oriana had decamped to a church in Hampstead to record our Christmas CD, because January is the new December. And we had a pretty ambitious recording schedule, truth be told. We were recording some fiendishly difficult carol arrangements by our own David-the-Conductor, plus a few of our favourite Christmas-themed choral pieces by other composers which were also pretty hard going. And wehad to record more than an hour’s worth of music in a mere two days, which is rather more than a professional choir would expect to do. However, if there’s one thing to be said about Oriana, it’s that we like a challenge, and we bounced around punching the air and stamping our feet in a suitably positive and energetic manner. Admittedly this was only because the church was freezing and we were trying to keep warm, but it made us look like a force to be reckoned with all the same. Alex-the-God was, I’m sure, quietly impressed.

David-the-Conductor threw us in at the deep end with “Angels from the Realms of Glory”. Loyal blog readers will recognise this as our regular Christmas Oriana Audience Challenge, where the audience has to hold the tune throughout the carol while we do everything we can to put them off. We actually did rather a good job of the piece without the audience there getting it all wrong (apologies, loyal Oriana audience! You’ll be amazed at how it’s actually supposed to sound though – buy a copy of the CD immediately). But recording it took us some time, and when we’d finished we were well over an hour behind schedule, with only one piece recorded and another 25 or so to go. Gulp.

David-the-Conductor panicked not, and onwards we determinedly went. And as more and more pieces made it into the can, our confidence began to rise and our devotion to Alex-the-God began to recede. Sorry Alex, but if I ever again hear the phrase “Splendid! Can you just give me one more from the top?” I may have a psychotic break. I was the soloist in Leighton’s Nativitie, and I swear there were so many takes of that solo that they can probably take one note from each take and still have enough left over to create a short tone row piece in the style of Schoenberg. At least I wasn’t singing the Gaudete soprano solo; Margaret-the-Soprano had to sing a top C solo over and over while David-the-Conductor and Alex-the-By-Now-Fallen-Angel commented on her diction and asked for slight differences in her tonal shading. I honestly don’t know how she did it, she is a hero among sopranos everywhere.

But the weekend progressed and we just got better and better. There were moments of glory (the sops top B at 8 o’clock on Sunday after two gruelling days was pretty damn impressive), moments of annoyance (largely induced by the wind messing up take after take – it felt a bit like we were recording in a wind tunnel), moments of knackeredness (Allain’s Christ’s Love Song – my voice gets itchy just thinking about it), moments of comedy (Mike-the-bass forgetting where he was and shouting “Yeah!” loudly into the mikes after the sopranos’ aforementioned top B), and moments of Alex-the-God trying to outdo David-the-Conductor in the unusual-but-evocative-descriptions stakes (“It’s all a bit Eeyore. It doesn’t have to be Tigger, but if it could at least be a bit Piglet…”).

And hour after hour, we revelled in glorious, impressive singing. We made it through to the end of Sunday, only 15 minutes over time, and with all but one piece recorded. Unbelievable. I feel like we put everything we had into the recording, and I can’t wait to hear the CD! I hope you’ll join me in rushing to HMV and demanding they stock it at once. Or, possibly, when next Christmas comes around.