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.