London Oriana Choir Blog

Starlight of Wonder in a Christmas Rainbow

2011-12-30T06:20:00.000-08:00

Christmas comes but once a year. Unless you’re in Oriana, in which case Christmas happens 3 times over a period of a month and a half. Yes indeed, having performed not one but two Christmas concerts in December, we are now rejecting the Gregorian calendar and all its works, and will be recording our Christmas CD in line with the Julian calendar Epiphany on the third weekend in January. Excellent! I always mistrusted that new-fangled Gregorian nonsense, and this will allow us to reach out to new audiences in such Julian calendar stalwarts as Ethiopia, the Ukraine and the Republic of Macedonia. After all, how can two million Macedonians be wrong?

The Christmas CD will be, as I understand it, pretty much a full replay of the Christmas concert, which I very much hope you attended. It was a smorgasbord of Christmassy delights, many of them original arrangements by our very own David-the-Conductor, all sung with a level of gusto that made me proud. Particular highlights were David’s arrangement of Star of Wonder (which frankly I am prepared to campaign hard to make Christmas Number One next year – it’s great!), and of course the marvellous Starlight (which I rave about in the blog every year so there’s nothing new there). Lowlight for me (apologies to the children’s choir and any other fans of this piece) was the Rainbow song. If you missed it, the song goes something like this:

“We’ll send you a rainbow for Christmas,
oooh, aaah,
a rainbow message of loveliness and joy and soft fluffy animals,
oooohh doo beeee doooh,
wear your knitted santa jumper from your grandma with a smile because Jesus loves you,
shooby doo wop,
together we’re a rainbow!”

To their credit the children’s choir sang marvellously (as did Oriana of course), and the song seemed to go down incredibly well with the audience, but frankly I could barely keep my head out of the sick bucket long enough to join in. Shudder.

But I’m not sure why I react so strongly to this piece, when Starlight (which to be fair, could also be considered “a bit naff”) is the very height of Christmassy joy for me. Isn’t it interesting that carolling “we’re reading a message by Starlight, and the message is love” makes me grin and caper, but singing “we’ll send you a rainbow for Christmas” makes me want to rupture my own vocal chords so as never to have to sing it again. I am the Scrooge of the rainbow song. Together, the rest of you may be a rainbow, but I am a little black cloud of grumpiness and I shed cold water on your message of burbling cheer.

Anyway, having to occasionally sing something that you hate does go with the territory in Oriana, and is a worthwhile price to pay for the chance to sing such a diverse range of music. And to prove it, we also had some superb and challenging choral pieces in the mix, which offset the froth enough for me to make it through the Rainbow Song alive. Leighton’s Nativitie in particular is a glorious and reflective piece of choral beauty, and while we weren’t quite perfect we certainly did justice to the mood of quiet awe. It sent shivers down my spine. Allain’s Christ’s Love Song, too, is a warm and shimmering piece of built-up harmonies and two-choir rivalry. (Choir one is the best! Nyah nyah nyah choir 2!) I’m really looking forward to doing them both the justice they deserve on the recording. And I hope all our stalwart Oriana fans will support us by: a) pledging to buy the CD; and b) keeping their decorations up until the CD recording is over. It’s still Christmas in the Ukraine everyone! Do it for global harmony!

Chriiiiiistmas tiiiiiime, festive greenery and alcoholic beverage

2011-11-29T03:59:00.000-08:00

It’s Chriiiiiiiist-maaaaaas! Well, nearly. And Oriana are into our annual Christmas concert rehearsal melee. Christmas, in the immortal words of Sir Cliff, is a time for living, a time for believing, a time for realising that we’re singing a LOT of music and we don’t really know it that well. Ooooh, mistletoe and wine. We always seem to pull it out of the bag in the end, though, and the audience get to roar along with a few carols while the choir try and put them off by harmonising in different keys and occasionally bursting into a different carol altogether, so it is always a fun and interactive experience.
However, one thing that always worries me about Christmas is the way it reveals my populist musical bent. Everyone else loves singing In Dulci Jubilo and frightening things in 13/8 by Russian men in horn-rimmed glasses, but for me its “Frosty the Snowman” and Giles Swayne’s “Starlight” every time (“People of planet Earth, hear what I say!”). Try as I might to raise a sardonic eyebrow as we belt out “We’re sending a message by Starliiiiiight, and the message is Luuurrrrrrrrve”, I can’t help but grin widely and dance a little bit.
So you can imagine my despair when I was looking up “In the Bleak Midwinter” for blogging purposes, and came across the following list of Best Carols of All Time, as voted for by assorted respectable musicians and choirmasters. They are thus:
1) In the Bleak Midwinter
2. In Dulci Jubilo (See? Told you)
3. A Spotless Rose
4. Bethlehem Down
5. Lully, Lulla
6. Tomorrow Shall be My Dancing Day
7. There is No Rose
8. O Come All Ye Faithful
9. Of the Father's Heart Begotten
10. What Sweeter Music

Cough, excuse me? What? No Hark the Herald Angels? No Little Donkey? No …. (sob) … Starlight? Admittedly Bethlehem Down and Lully Lulla are nice pieces, but they’re not exactly the kind of thing Santa would burst out of the chimney to, are they? And what’s all this stuff about roses?? Where’s the holly and the ivy? This is Christmas with the Christmas taken out of it, as though sleighbells and chocolate and happy songs about snow are beneath our musical intellect.
However, even these stuffed shirts pale into insignificance next to “Hymnologist and theologian Ian Bradley” who according to Wikipedia has questioned the theology of “In the Bleak Midwinter” thusly:
"Is it right to say that heaven cannot hold God, nor the earth sustain, and what about heaven and earth fleeing away when he comes to reign?"
What?????? It’s a Christmas carol, not a PhD thesis in bible studies. Similarly can it be right to exhort the hooved and probably tone-deaf Little Donkey to “ring out those bells tonight”?*. Is it correct form to expect Jesus to arrive on no less than three sailing ships on Christmas Day? Of course it isn’t, but what’s wrong with a bit of festive licence? Honestly, when did Christmas become the time of pernickety fuss-budgets? (Try rhyming that, Sir Cliff)
Well if you can’t beat them, join them. I typed intellectual Christmas carols into Google, and would like to announce that my new favourite Christmas Carol is “Listen, the celestial messengers produce harmonious vocalization”. We may not be singing this at the Oriana Christmas concert, but we will be regaling you with “Embellish the Interior Passageways”, “The first person nominative plural of a triumvirate of far eastern heads of state”, and happily, “Obese personification fabricated from compressed mounds of crystalline structures”**. Bet you can hardly wait now.

*If Simon Funnell points out that it’s actually Bethlehem and not the donkey that is supposed to ring the bells, you will be ruining my favourite and most enduring Christmas image and therefore getting your name on the Fuss-budget List.

**With thanks to Christmas Songs for the Intellectual” http://www.oocities.org/timessquare/8965/newsonga.htm

The chaos of flats

2011-10-30T07:49:00.001-07:00

I had my second experience of being an audience member at the Oriana concert early this month. And once again they were marvellous without me. This is starting to get disturbing. In the a capella pieces they were full and sonorous, and in the accompanied pieces they manfully ignored the organist’s occasional attempts to throw them off by playing a different piece entirely, and stayed with David-the-Conductor throughout. It was a tour de force of singing, and I was very proud of them.

Particular highlights were Byrd “Sing Joyfully” – what an amazing rendition – and Purcell “Hear My Prayer” which was stunning. And if there were any lowlights, for me it would have been Wood and Ireland and their anthemy ilk. David-the-Conductor will hate me for saying it, but seriously, get a choir to sing some traditional English Pantserie and throw in an “um-cha” organ and we might as well have been promenading in Blackpool on a bank holiday weekend. I could practically see the front row getting out their buckets and spades. The choir still did an amazing job of course, so at least we can now move on to more interesting repertoire feeling like we’ve shown Songs of Praise how it should be done.

Anyway, I’ve been mulling over something David-the-Conductor said in rehearsal a few weeks ago, when once again we were struggling to keep the pitch up on a dreary October evening. Anyone that has ever sung in a choir will have experienced this challenge. David kept yelling and doing his upwards finger-point, but we stayed flat as a souffle. (I am no cook, it must be said). Finally, in despair, David said that he didn’t know why choirs drop the pitch so often, but maybe humanity is just attracted to the chaos of flats. Isn’t that rather a lovely idea? But it’s an interesting point; why do choirs go flat rather than sharp? I decided to do some investigating, and found a veritable smorgasbord of finger-pointing to explain the reasons. Ready?

1) It’s physical. There seems to be a strong lobby for pitch depending on good support and breathing, so that pitch will drop when your muscles are tired. Or it could be that the barometric pressure is low. Or your muscle tension is too high. Or you haven’t laughed enough that day, so your soft palate hasn;t been raised enough.

2) It’s the key signature. C major and F major have come up as keys that humans just aren’t designed to sing in. Damn F major.

3) It’s the conductor! I had a good laugh over the following passage by Margaret Nesse:

“Some choral directors have a tendency, especially during performance, to point upward surreptitiously with a finger when the choir as a whole, or a particular section, is singing flat. Blackstone notes that a conductor who points his finger upward encourages singers to tilt their chins back, thereby constricting the vocal mechanism, causing a squeezed sound, and increasing, rather than decreasing, the likelihood of a poor intonation.”

Sound familiar, fellow Orianites? Tee hee! But I’ve just remembered that I have to re-audition for David-the-Conductor this year, so I’d like to point out that it is DEFINITELY not David’s fault when we’re flat, and furthermore, he is the best conductor ever in history. Moving swiftly on...

4) It’s all lies! Choirs can go sharp just as easily as flat, but sharpness tends to be heard more as overtones and threrefore brightness of sound, meaning that the listener notices more if the choir is flat than if they are sharp. Isn’t that interesting?

5) I knew we’d get here eventually – it’s the sopranos! we go flat at the top and drag everyone else down with us. I would have been offended at reading this, except that I’m friends with enough altos to have heard it all before. But how’s this for an argument as to why this is the case?

“No one has yet brought up what I have found to be the MOST common reason for choirs, and sopranos in general, to go flat. U.S. society values a low speaking pitch rather than a high one in women (attributing idiocy and flightiness to women with high speaking voices), and most singers are sufficiently sensitive to this to keep their speaking voices down. Unfortunately, if in singing the vowels are placed in the same place they are in speaking, the head resonance will be insufficiently active and the notes around the register break at the top of the treble staff will SOUND flat from a lack of upper overtones. (Try them against an oscilliscope. They won't test out nearly as flat as they sound.) This makes it harder and harder for the soprano to sing up into the top of her range, and she will tire quickly - all of which contributes to further flatness of pitch. THE OTHER SINGERS IN THE CHOIR HEAR THE APPARENTLY FLAT PITCH, AND PROMPTLY MATCH IT.”

Ooooh. So…

6) It’s society’s fault! I blame the government. What’s the solution?

“Promise the sopranos that no one in the group will impugn their intellect, and exercise sufficient tyranny to make that stick.”

Heh heh heh! I love it!

Sorry, who am I? Where is this? Choir, you say?

2011-09-21T02:47:00.000-07:00

I’m not quite ready for choir restarting after the summer break. We’re now nearly three weeks in to the autumn term and I’ve been at rehearsal in body, but I don’t think my spirit has quite got the point yet. David-the-Conductor stands at the front and waves his hands about, and I sit and watch vaguely as though he’s just doing modern dance. All these women are sitting around me, and they keep all singing in unison, and I sort of jerk to attention and mumble along. It’s like being at a Communist rally. And I was plagued by a nagging suspicion all the way through choir last Wednesday that there was something I’d forgotten – other than all my music (oops). And then I realised this morning, rather belatedly – of course! The Blog!

So apologies all you hardy blog followers, nearly three weeks have already gone by and I have failed to report that once again Oriana are in full song, and sounding rather glorious. And good thing too, because this term we are doing three concerts, a TV appearance, recording a CD and going on tour to the Isle of Wight. Do we know how to challenge ourselves or what? (musically, that is – I’m not insulting the Isle of Wight which is, I’m sure, very lovely). So we haven’t got any time to rest on our laurels, and have got straight into the music.

Happily the music for the first concert is glorious. Really and truly amazing. It’s a bible-themed concert in some vague and murky way, which means fabulous text in many and varied arrangements by the full gamut of British composers. We were working on John Ireland’s ‘Greater Love Hath No Man’ on Wednesday, which set me to musing about Ireland. He seems to have been a man divorced from his geographical destiny. He started badly by being born in England (doh!) of Scottish descent (doh!), and spent much time flirting with visits to the Channel Islands before realising that they were spelt wrong. He was briefly excited to form a United Kingdom at the Royal College of Music when Britten arrived, but the two found it hard to overcome their musical differences and devolution was the only solution. At this point, desperate and broken, Ireland decided to branch out to the Netherlands and spent the rest of his life in a windmill.

He was basically the living embodiment of the EU, and I had a sudden urge as the music swirled around me on Wednesday to get this piece adopted as the European Anthem. However, it appears that some feckless German (or “fellow citizen of the EU”)was ahead of me with a rival campaign, as apparently the EU Heads of State have already opted for an Ode to Joy by someone called Beethoven. Well for heaven’s sake, what do they know?

Bloggiana is all proud of the Oriana choir at Gerontius

2011-06-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

At its first ever outing in 1900, The Dream of Gerontius was a famous disaster, causing Elgar to declare "I have allowed my heart to open once – it is now shut against every religious feeling & every soft, gentle impulse for ever."
"Bit hysterical, old chap," murmured the rest of Victorian Britain, shuffling uncomfortably from foot to foot at this alarming display of feeling. "Stiff upper lip, what?"
Luckily Elgar's drama-queen moment stopped short of destroying all the copies of Gerontius in his despair. Otherwise I would have been watching the Oriana choir stand on the Barbican stage in communal silence for an hour and a half on Wednesday. Probably that would have got a bit dull about half way through.

This was the first time I've actually sat in the audience for an Oriana concert, and I was very much looking forward to viewing from the outside. Particularly as I'd seen all kinds of interesting instructions coming frantically around the choir email list in the days preceding the concert. Would the choir be able to gracefully split into two choirs during the performance? How on earth were the semi-chorus going to surreptitiously change into surplices while on stage? And how, pray tell, can a choir "stand demonically"? I couldn’t wait!

Well I have to say the choir surpassed themselves. Even drama queen Elgar would have been nodding contentedly in his grave. We'd been rehearsing the demons chorus pretty much every week since January, and come the night it was so sharp the audience was practically bleeding in the stalls. I didn’t notice any demonic standing, but there was definitely some snarling and I'm pretty sure I saw the tenor section trying to make off with some souls. And kudos to the semi-chorus - I had advance warning that they were going to change into surplices in full view of the audience, and yet I still didn’t see them doing it. It was a moment of glory when they suddenly appeared in bright white at the top of the ranks of choir dressed in black. How on earth did they manage it?? They must have laid down on the floor and shuffled into them sleeping bag-style.

But the bit I was looking forward to most was the choir attempting to split into two choirs during an orchestral passage of play in the sceond half. I was practically dancing on my seat with excitement at the prospect of the choir shuffling sideways with fixed grins, looking more and more nervous as the end of the orchestral passage approached, abandoning all restraint in the last two bars and diving through the wind section in order to make it across the stage in time. So you can imagine my disappointment when the choir came back on for the second half already split into two choir formation, the plan having been sneakily abandoned before the performance. Damn you, David-the-Conductor, for thwarting my enjoyment! I paid good money to see that.

All in all, though, it was a brilliant performance and I was very proud of the choir indeed. (Although my nose is slightly out of joint that they were so good without me. But probably it was all the sterling work I put in at rehearsals that made the difference. Yep, that'll be it.)

We're about to break for summer, so no blogs for the next couple of months. Thanks for following the adventures of the choir this year and see you all in September!

Way haul away to the Barbican

2011-05-21T03:53:00.001-07:00

As rehearsal for our sea-themed concert started last Friday, one of the other sopranos sidled up to me, clutching her folder with a worried expression.
“How many pieces have you got?” she hissed.
I looked in my folder, just to recount one more time. “Five,” I murmured back.
She nodded, relieved, and I patted her shoulder reassuringly. This was the lowest number of pieces we’ve done at a concert in quite some time, as we normally like to challenge ourselves with at least 15 pieces, all in different styles. So we were all fighting the insecurity that our lightweight music folders were instilling. If we aren’t risking a hernia, it just doesn’t feel like an Oriana concert.

Luckily, what we lacked in sheer numbers of pieces, we made up for in complexity. The Bruckner is superb but it’s not easy to sing well, and we were all desperate to do it justice. The Willcocks was tricky in many places, and the Bingham (I just can’t hide my feelings here) is the stuff that pelagic nightmares are made of. And we were rehearsing with an excellent but entirely new brass, wind and percussion section, so precious rehearsal minutes trickled by while we tried to get used to each other’s sound.

So come the concert we were once again in the throes of panic, but as always we rose to the challenge and pulled off a passable performance. The Bingham was a little seat-of-the-pants, but falling back on an old Oriana stalwart trick, we plastered grins on our faces, picked any note at random, and sang it out confidently. The resulting dissonant clashes may or may not have been as written, but at least we sang something, and to be honest I think that’s more than the piece deserved. (Sorry Bingham. It might grow on me. Eventually.) And once it was over we got to reward ourselves with the Wreck of the Hesperus, which was loads of fun.

Even the stress of the Bingham paled into insignificance next to the tension at the interval, when we discovered that our changing room at the back of the balcony was locked, with all the second half music inside. What were the chances we could sing the Bruckner Mass from memory? We were hastily comparing notes (“Yes, it definitely starts with Kyrie …. something …..”) when the church verger calmly removed her shoes, scaled the walls of the church, abseiled from the roof, crashed through the changing room window, and blew the door with some plastic explosive.* She is clearly a true Bruckner fan. The second half was saved.

So we’re now into rehearsing for our final concert of the season – Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius at the Barbican on June 22nd. Rehearsals have been going really well, and it is going to be a stunner of a concert. But just when we were being lulled into a false sense of security, David-the-Conductor was struck by a vision at Wednesday’s rehearsal. Part of the score is written for double choir, but due to the practical difficulties of getting a large choir to change formation on stage during a performance, it’s never really performed as a double choir. Well, as all our stalwart fans know, the Oriana laughs in the face of practical difficulty. Let’s face it, we began one concert with children lying in piles in front of us pretending to be dead, so do you really think a simple thing like shuffling about the stage is going to thwart us?

Unfortunately we don’t have a completely unblemished track record when it comes to moving while singing. Anyone that came to our Christmas concert will remember our efforts to process into the church while singing. The plan was to enter in formation, and surround the audience with the sops on one side, the altos on the other, and the men at the front. Or the back. Or something. We actually ended up with the sopranos in the middle of the bass section, which was quite a feat given that there are about five times more sopranos, and I didn’t see the tenors at all so I think they might have accidentally processed out of the church and into Costa Coffee next door. Let’s just say it wasn’t a complete success, so there is a certain level of nervousness about trying to manage another complicated manoeuvre with the whole Barbican watching. But I have every confidence. If we made it all the way to the end of the Bingham without stopping, we can accomplish anything.

*There may be an element of poetic license in this description.

Avast ye, concert lubbers!

2011-05-05T04:09:00.000-07:00

According to good old Wikipedia, Percy Grainger’s comment on his first ever sexual encounter with a woman was "I thought I was about to die; If I remember correctly, I only experienced fear of death. I don't think that any joy entered into it". Ouch, poor lady.

Oddly enough, though, that sums up exactly how I felt while rehearsing Grainger’s piece “We Have Fed Our Sea For A Thousand Years”. There’s usually at least one piece I can’t stand in every concert, and this time Grainger has drawn the short straw, much as I enjoy some of his other music. “We have fed our sea…” is unabashedly nationalistic - the kind of piece that makes me feel like I should be wearing union jack knickers and voting BNP. Oh well, it’s on the programme for our concert next week, so I’ll just have to grit my teeth and get through it somehow. Lie back and think of England, as it were.

Luckily, I’m very excited about all the other pieces on the programme, so I’m really looking forward to singing our hearts out in Greenwich next week. I’ve already banged on about how much I love the Bruckner, so I won’t repeat myself (but it IS really really great!) Also on the programme is Hamish McCunn’s setting of the Longfellow poem “The Wreck of the Hesperus”, which is loads of fun. Legend has it that Longfellow was due to sail on the Lexington on its fatal voyage, but missed the departure because he was discussing the poem with his publisher. Oooh, spooky. And according to Wikipedia, “the wreck of the Hesperus” is a colloquial term for “dishevelled in appearance”. Not a term I have ever heard or used, personally, but let’s see how often I can get it in to the rest of the blog.

MacCunn seems primarily famous for having forced Hubert Parry to admit publicly that his personal life was falling apart, after taking umbrage at not being invited over for a visit. I assume the revelation went something like this:

MacCunn: Och, you haven’t invited me over for a wee dram
Parry: I’m sorry, my life resembles the wreck of the Hesperus right now
MacCunn: ah ya wee scamp!
David-the-Conductor: Stop pretending you can do a Scottish accent, Bloggiana

Also on the programme is Judith Bingham’s Salt in the Blood. It is my considered opinion that Bingham hates female choristers. Salt in the Blood is definitely a piece for the men, who get to sing jolly hornpipes while the women have to waft boringly about, being wind and waves and pelagic storm petrels, whatever they are. The exciting part is going to be trying to find our entry notes. At one point the altos are having to pitch their entry from a glissando augmented fourth whistle in the soprano part, which could be exciting. We had our first attempt at a full run-through last night, and – yes - it resembled the wreck of the Hesperus. Basically, the piece will go really well as long as David-the-Pianist comes to the concert and plays our parts along with us. If we’re on our own, we could well be heading fast for the reef of Norman’s Woe. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Bruckner and his masses of sound

2011-03-29T03:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve never especially liked Bruckner. It’s the huffing and puffing enormous symphonies that put me off. Blah de blah de blah, I think, before drifting off to think about what happened in last night’s Waking the Dead. At the end of a concert my friends burst into rapturous applause and I jerk awake, pretending I just closed my eyes to listen more fervently. Mike-the-bass will then point out the bit in the third movement that reminded him of the clarinet theme of Mahler’s umpteenth symphony, and wryly question the conductor’s interpretation of some important 16-bar moment. And I will only be able to contribute to the discussion by saying I liked the lead violinist’s shoes and that I thought the timpanist fell asleep. Bruckner really does nothing for my ability to bluff it as a musician.

So the E minor Mass, which we’re performing in our next concert, came as a massive shock to me. I love it. It’s a truly glorious mix of the simplicity of renaissance polyphony and expressive romantic Bruckner-ish harmonies. Just gorgeous. If he could write music like this, why on earth did he mess around with those awful symphonies? (Sorry Mike-the-bass, I just couldn’t pretend to like them any longer).

I blame Wagner. In the 1860s Bruckner fell in love with Wagnerian harmony, and began to pal around with Wagner, probably gushing constantly about how marvellous he was. Rudiger Bornhoft’s preface to our copies of the E Minor Mass talks about Bruckner’s “inbred obsequiousness” and backs that up with a saccharine quote from his letter to Adalbert Schreyer – “Crying from the depths, I once again send you my most heartfelt thanks and my deepest admiration for your heroic artistic exploit.” Pass me a bucket. (although Bornhoft goes on to describe the E Minor Mass as “tower[ing] like a mountain peak far above the sacred vocal music of the nineteenth century” so Bruckner’s not the only one prone to effusive enthusiasm). Bruckner’s humility does seem to be genuine though – he just doesn’t seem to have been very good at expressing himself in terms that a normal human being would expect. My favourite anecdote is about him tipping Hans Richter after a rehearsal of his Fourth Symphony - pressing some money into his hand and telling him to buy himself a drink. How marvellous!

So I’ve started to think of Bruckner as a sort of Wagnerian henchman - Smithers to Wagner’s Mr Burns, if you will. And I’m sure it will come as no shock to you that I’m no fan of Wagner either (Mike-the-bass is probably scribbling me off his Christmas card list even as I type). I guess the Wagnerian influence explains why his symphonies are so vast and unwieldy. But there’s more to Bruckner than this heavy German romanticism – his religious music often hung onto older musical traditions in structure, topped by luscious Brucknerian harmony. And a superb combination it is. I can’t wait to sing the E Minor Mass - even only two weeks in to rehearsals it’s clearly going to be a highlight of the year. I urge you to come to Greenwich on May 13th to hear us sing it. And if you do, please get into the Bruckner spirit and try to tip David-the-Conductor at the end of the concert. Oh go on. I’d really like to see what he does.

Oriana Choir leaves no stone unturned

2011-02-15T06:23:00.000-08:00

Hand on heart, singing with the Oriana is a sublime experience, a joy to be part of. Whenever we finish a good concert, I come out and ask myself: “Bloggiana, what could possibly better the experience of singing stunning pieces with other like-minded, talented people, all working together for the glory of the music?” And I always answer myself the same way: “percussion, that’s what!”

I hold that there is no piece, however beautiful and ethereal, that wouldn’t be bettered by a bit of solo triangle or a guest appearance from my old primary school friend, the guiro. My absolute favourite concert of the whole last season was performing Whitacre’s “Cloudburst” in a church in Segovia, complete with hand chimes, random clapping and a huge cymbal that Angela-the-Alto had to somehow hide between her legs until the appropriate moment. Random percussion makes everything 10 times more fun, it really does.

So you can imagine my excitement when I saw the rehearsal instructions this week from David-the-Conductor: “Please bring two stones to bang together. They should be resonant.” Hurray!!!! Percussion time again. And this time it’s DIY percussion – even better! I instantly fell upon my copy of “Musical Instrument Design: practical information for instrument making” by Bart Hopkin, to look for ideas. I would like to share the following useful information:

“Instruments using stone as the initial vibrating element are called lithophones. Many different sorts of stone marimbas and chimes have been made, as well as some stone whistles. The resonant qualities of stone vary substantially from one sort to another; most are extremely dull, while some, like travertine marble, and some slates and volcanic rocks, produce a fairly bright tone quality.”

It was as I ran out of the front door, giggling like a schoolgirl, to look for volcanic rocks in the garden, that I remembered I’m not doing the next concert. I am actually genuinely gutted to be missing it now. I know this is going to disgust the musical purists among you, but for me, missing the opportunity to sing some fantastic and little-performed music by women composers, sad though it is, simply pales in comparison to missing out on banging some stones together. At heart I am still a 6-year old and those times with the guiro were the best of my life.

Ah well, at least this way I don’t have to be worried that my stone will be the wrong sort of stone. If everyone else has managed to find travertine marble, would my pebbles from the front garden shape up? I wouldn’t want to sound extremely dull if everyone else was resonating with a bright tone quality. Go on choir, put some effort into it and choose those stones carefully. My top tip – pop into Heals and pick up some designer stones. The tone quality might be variable, but at least you’ll look good.

Female composers and International Women's Day

2011-01-25T05:45:00.000-08:00

2011 is here! Here’s hoping for another year of glorious and diverse music from the Oriana Choir. And we’ve certainly got an eclectic mix coming up in the first half, until we break for the summer. We’ll be rounding off the 2010/11 season with Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius at the Barbican, which is very exciting, and before that we’ll be performing a concert in Greenwich with the exciting working title “Bruckner, Brass and Boats”. I’ll look forward to seeing what makes the programme there. But our first concert this year, to mark International Women’s Day on the 8th March, is a celebration of female composers.

David-the-Conductor spent about 20 minutes at the beginning of last week’s rehearsal arguing simultaneously that women both are and are not prejudiced against in classical music. It was a bit confusing, but that seems about right. Women have been active in music throughout history, but in terms of performance, the works written by women that are regularly heard are a tiny drop in an ocean of standard repertoire by men. Music has been dominated by men through the whole of our living memory.

It seems to me that the prejudice is largely structural rather than individual. Fanny Mendelssohn’s parents educated her in music, but her father famously told her "Perhaps for Felix music will become a profession, while for you it will always remain but an ornament; never can and should it become the foundation of your existence." Says it all really. And success in the musical world comes down to performers being interested in performing your music. No-one will ever hear it otherwise, and how can you develop your craft without feedback? So certainly historically, and perhaps to an extent today, women have been unsuccessful because of a resistance to performing their music and fewer opportunities to persuade people to do so.

And even if you do get it performed, what if people don’t like it? We watched Sian Massey put not a foot wrong in her line-judging of the Liverpool-Wolves match this week, making the Sky Sports commentators look ridiculous in their out-moded comments about women’s understanding of the offside rule. But if she’d slipped up and made a mistake on that close-to-call Liverpool goal, as even the best referees and line judges do occasionally, how many frustrated Liverpool fans might have said something similar in the heat of the moment? To succeed in male-dominated professions women have to work that bit harder. So does this mean that music by women has to be mind-blowing from the start in order for that composer to be listened to again?

Perhaps the most annoying thing is that women still seem to be seen not just as composers, but as female composers, which in itself is a prejudice that’s unworthy of the diversity of music they produce. Diana Ambache, formerly musical director of the Ambache Chamber Orchestra says “In 1995-7 we did a concert series in London featuring music by women composers, presenting several premières of music by women of the last 250 years. BBC Radio 3 producers were invited to every one of the nine concerts, but didn't come to any - in other words they were not willing to listen to any of this music. This looks like prejudice.”

I am determined to stand out from the crowd and judge female composers on their own merits, not letting my feminist tendencies get in the way of my musical opinions. So here we go: I can’t stand Lutyens. There. She’s credited with bringing Schoenberg’s serialism to the UK, which in itself is enough to put me off. I blame YOU for that hideous A’level experience of trying to compose with a tone row, Lutyens! We’re singing her “Verses of Love” at the concert, for our sins, and by the end of rehearsing it last week I was tempted to kick myself in the head to distract myself from the horror. Maybe it will grow on me.
We also ran through a couple of pieces by Boulanger, which were very French and quite lush with gorgeous thick harmonic texture. Difficult, but once we’ve got them nailed I’m sure they’ll sound fab. And we finished with a look at a piece by Rehnkvist, of which my overwhelming impression was that it’s a bit hard. So I’m quaking in my boots a little for this concert. That’s 18 new pieces to learn and so far they’ve all been technically challenging. Gulp. Let’s hope the rest are all about Three Blind Mice level (which is actually what my tone row composition most sounded like. I may not have fully grasped the technique of serialism).

Merry Christmas Everyone!

2010-12-21T04:32:00.001-08:00

The blog wasn’t here on time last week due to adverse weather conditions. Which is actually true as I was planning to write it on Saturday, but was thwarted by almost getting snowed in at Louise-the-Soprano’s wedding. An intrepid band of Orianans had braved the cold and the unknown horrors of the world outside the M25 in order to sing some choir classics at the ceremony. But the snow caused some problems as the bridal car couldn’t get up the hill, and so there was an uneasy half an hour of waiting in choir formation in the church until Louise finally trudged in on foot, wearing a fetching wedding-dress-and-welly combo. It was a lovely wedding though, and as a bonus we had the spectacle of men in morning suits digging cars out from under a good foot of snow – and many thanks to the posh-frocked lady in heels and fascinator who obligingly gave our car a push up the hill.

Wedding high-jinks weren’t the only Oriana occasion this week, though, as it was our Christmas concert last Thursday and it was fab. We were unusually well-prepared this time – we’d sung through everything on the programme AT LEAST once, and we didn’t have to use the interval as extra rehearsal time, so it was most relaxing for a Christmas concert. The Audience Challenge went smoothly, although everyone at the front was quite clearly wishing they’d sat further away from us when David-the-Conductor explained they were going to have to hold the tune by themselves while we harmonised around them. But we clearly attract a better class of audience, and they made it through to the end no matter what we threw at them. Or at any rate, they all sang the last note in a confident manner! The Poulenc Christmas Motets were magical and an absolutely joy to sing. But my highlight of the concert was Giles Swayne’s Starlight, which is a very simple piece for unison voices and piano accompaniment, written in the 1980s while Swayne was busy paring down his sound. It’s the most Christmassy song I’ve ever heard, and David-the-Conductor bangs it out on the piano with an infectious enthusiasm. Every year I cross my fingers and fervently pray we get to sing it, but last year we had a medieval-themed Christmas concert so it wasn’t on the programme, to my despair. I very nearly forged a copy of it arranged for sackbutt and lute in the hopes that I could fool David-the-Conductor into including it as an original by Henry VIII, but Giles Swayne falls into the “alive and therefore able to sue me” category of composers, so I forebore. Although given that Private Eye described him as “amiably bonkers” he may have enjoyed the intrigue. Anyway I welcomed “Starlight” back by bopping and grinning inanely all the way through, which I think is perfectly acceptable in a Christmas concert, and we finished with a rollicking Hark the Herald Angels which is always how I know that Christmas is here. So I’m feeling all Christmassy and goodwill-to-all-men-y now, so have a fantastic Christmas, and the blog will be back rather more intermittently in the new year so hope you’ll keep reading then.

Christmassy Poulenc

2010-12-04T08:09:00.000-08:00

Calling all local hospitals, last week’s alert to be on stand-by during our concert is cancelled. I repeat, hospitals, stand down!

After this week’s rehearsal I am now confident that we won’t require their aid after all during Angels from the Realms of Glory. David-the-Conductor has made some changes to his arrangement to simplify it for us, and as we get more familiar with the trickier harmonies and cross rhythms they’re really starting to fall into place. So carnage is unlikely to rule our performance of this piece, although it might well be worth still having a St John’s Ambulance stand, just in case. But that’s an impressive improvement in just one week, isn’t it? And we’ve still got two weeks to go until the concert. If we continue the same rate of improvement maybe we’ll end up being able to heal the sick ourselves.

We actually had an extremely successful rehearsal this week despite sub-zero temperatures in the church which acts as our back-up rehearsal venue. Even this provided a good opportunity to get to know new people in the choir, as all 60 of us tried to crowd onto the 6-by-4-foot heating grate at half time. Survival of the fittest and judicious use of elbows reined. Once rehearsal resumed we raced through lots of music, targeting improvements until it all started to sound fantastic. The Poulenc Christmas Motets were especially beautiful. Poulenc of course was one of Les Six, a group of composers pulled together by Cocteau for little reason other than that he thought it would be a great marketing ploy and they’d make loads of dosh. Kind of like a chic 1920s Simon Cowell. Poulenc happened to be standing in front of Honegger in the baguette queue at the local Carre-Four when Cocteau was passing, and a phenomenon was born. The group unsurprisingly fell apart almost before it was formed, citing “musical differences”, and they all went off to have solo careers of varying success. Poulenc managed to successfully shake off his siX-Factor associations and underwent a bit of a religious conversion, becoming a composer of some of the most glorious sacred music ever written. The Christmas Motets are up there with the best, and are the cherry on top of a fantastic Christmas programme. I urge you to come to this year’s concert, it’s going to be a stunner.

Angels from the Realms of ... Gory

2010-11-27T05:10:00.000-08:00

What can I say about choir this week? It was a smorgasbord of Christmassy stuff. A bit of Handel, a touch of traditional arr. Wilcocks, a healthy dollop of Giles Swayne’s Starlight (hurray!), a smattering of Bruckner and a pinch of traditional arr Drummond combined for some exciting musical fireworks and hideous musical collapses.

The collapses were largely in “Angels from the Realms of Glory”, which we’re singing in a not unchallenging arrangement by our very own David-the-Conductor. Angels from the Realms of Glory was written by James Montgomery in the 19th century, and appears to have several possible tunes. In England, though, the first time it appeared someone said “oh hang on, it’s that Angels one, I know how this goes” and ever since we have sung it to the tune of “Angels we have Heard on High”. David-the-Conductor’s arrangement takes this traditional carol interchange and expands on it, throwing in “Gloria”s and “Joy to the world”s with gay abandon and mixing them all up in some very unexpected harmonies. This was complicated stuff, and slowly but surely we all lost track of where we were. By verse 4 we may as well have been wading in chromatic mud. David-the-Conductor somehow coped with the horror of listening to us mess up his arrangement and dragged us through to the end with some very determined arm-waving, but we definitely didn’t finish in realms of glory. We’ve still got two weeks to polish it up though, so I’m sure we’ll be ready to spring it on the audience by the time the concert rolls around.

And the audience had better look to their laurels, because Angels is this year’s Oriana Audience Challenge, where the audience have to grit their teeth and make it through a carol together while the choir do everything we can to put them off. The audience are usually surprisingly good at this, but it is always a moment of tension in our Christmas concert. Someone in the second row actually swooned under the pressure two years ago and had to be revived by Phil the Tenor. If Wednesday’s run-through of Angels is anything to go by I think we might have to put the local hospitals on high alert this year.

Hysterical? Moi?

2010-11-19T04:49:00.000-08:00

I wasn't sure if there was going to be a blog entry this week, as I was too ill to go to choir and had to stay at home and watch The Apprentice instead (just for the Prokofiev, you understand). But given the scandalized text I received just after rehearsal was over, I felt I must acknowledge the fact that David-the-Conductor told the soprano section that they’re much more hysterical than the altos. Oh HOW can you SAY that!!! That’s COMPLETELY UNFAIR (clutches heart in anguish). And after ALL I DO for the choir! (You can’t see, because this is only some words on a screen, but I am actually storming off in high dudgeon right now.)

At least the insults got shared around, as I then heard from several quarters that David told the whole choir they were “singing like slags” during Berlioz’ Shepherds Farewell. How does one sing like a slag? I’m intrigued!

Of all the composers we’re performing in the Christmas concert, though, Berlioz is probably the most likely to approve of a bunch of slags singing his work. This is after all a man who declared “If the Emperor of Russia wants me, I am up for sale”. Oo-er. Berlioz does seem to have had quite a colourful life. In Paris when the July Revolution broke out, he finished writing a cantata amid the sound of bullets and then went out to “roam around Paris ‘till morning, pistol in hand”. He doesn’t specify whether this was anything to do with the revolution, it might just have been a regular pastime. He does seem to have been quite bloodthirsty. At one point he hatched a plot to murder his ex-fiancee and his family, dashing from Italy to France with a pistol. Ever the planner, he also took poison in case the pistol misfired, and women’s clothing, ostensibly to disguise himself but really so that he could strangle her with some pantaloons if the poison didn’t work either.

Luckily he thought better of the plan and so lived long enough to compose the Shepherds Farewell. Even this innocuous piece has an exciting back story. He first released it under a pseudonym, to prove the critics that they were wrong about his music, which received regular maulings. And they fell for it hook line and sinker, raving about it. One woman even went so far as to declare that “Berlioz could never write a tune as simple and charming as this little piece”. Far from being happy at this success, Berlioz was angry on behalf of all his other music. History does not declare what happened to the lady critic. I expect Berlioz lured her to the aquarium and ran her through with a swordfish.

(references all from good old Wikipedia)

From a Plant to a Gardner

2010-11-12T05:03:00.000-08:00

Robert Plant’s Electric Prom was televised last Saturday night, and my nose managed to sneak into a shot all by itself. I was most impressed by its blatant move to grab stardom and embark on a solo career. I guess the rest of my face has been holding it back all this time. There was quite a lot of angst flying around on Facebook during the day about who would look the silliest on TV. Well, I can reveal that the “biggest numpty” award goes to ... no-one. Everyone looked surprisingly good and confident. We should definitely step out from behind our choir folders and sing from memory more often, as it makes us look much more at one with the music. As to who looked best, well, that’s a hard one to call. Lots of people were jiving around their mikes like seasoned professionals. But Tom in the basses managed to go that extra step, with his relaxed confidence when Robert Plant introduced the choir. Everyone else looked a bit sheepish, but Tom accepted the plaudits of his adoring public as though born into royalty. Tom, you win the “Face of Oriana” award for your ability to soundlessly enunciate the word “Thank you”. Great diction.

Right, that really is it for the Electric Prom now, and we're well into rehearsing our Christmas music now. The Gardning leave that I so optimistically predicted a couple of weeks back is already at an end, as John Gardner’s “Tomorrow shall be our Dancing Day” has somehow sneaked on to the programme for our Christmas concert. I’m going to get all my bitching in early, as I’m secretly certain I’m going to end up loving this piece. But at the moment I am once again outraged by Gardner’s inability to pick a time signature and stick to it. And seriously, what is that phrasing all about?? It’s as though he thinks “what would a singer do naturally?” and then does exactly the opposite. You spend hours trying to drum the unnatural phrasing into your head, only for a hollow sense of futility to hit when you actually manage to get it right. It’s the musical equivalent of a Rubix Cube. Or at least I assume so, I’ve never actually managed to finish one of those. To make matters worse, Louise in the First Sops has decided she wants the choir to sing this piece at her wedding in December, so we’re obliged by the bonds of friendship to put the work in. I’m tempted to say we’ll only sing it if she has it for her entrance music. It’d be fun watching her oscillate wildly between a waltz and a two-step all the way up the aisle.

BAH-HUMBUG!

2010-11-06T05:40:00.000-07:00

The excitement of the Electric Prom is now almost completely behind us, although it’s being televised tonight (Saturday) on BBC2, so we do still have the “who looks like the biggest numpty” competition to come. I will report in full on the results next week! (Unless it’s me, in which case I will never mention it again). So we are now onto rehearsals for our next concert, which is, of course, Christmas. Up and down the land, choral singers everywhere are already harking the herald angels and wondering what exactly figgy pudding is. We were almost completely carol-less last year, so this year we’re going to make up for it with not one but two concerts packed full of Christmas cheer. David-the-Conductor has asked for suggestions from the choir for what we’d like to sing in our Christmas concert, and I’m delighted to see that Swayne’s “Starlight” is already on the list (“People of Planet Earth, hear what I say”!), although I think that whoever suggested Bohemian Rhapsody is likely to be disappointed.

I love Christmas carols, but not in November. I get pre-christmas rage when I see trees in department stores. It’s still AUTUMN you weirdos! So even though we tempered the premature Christmas jollity with bits of The Dream of Gerontius, I was still not in the best of moods at choir this week. And as always, when I’m a bit grumpy, I began to passively resist the situation. I diminuendoed when I should have been crescendoing. I emphasised off the beat notes. I sang random women’s names instead of the lyrics. It cheered me up no end, but thinking about it afterwards, I’m actually quite concerned. How come no-one noticed that I was belting out “Beryl and Flo” instead of “peril and woe”?? David-the-Conductor didn’t stop us even once to say “no no, that’s BURIAL, not MURIEL”. I am clearly not contributing much to the overall sound of the choir. But maybe I just need to get more strategic. The soprano section is too huge and solid to be undermined easily by one rogue scrooge. Maybe I should move to the tenors.

London Oriana becomes London Owliana at the BBC Electric Proms

2010-10-30T08:10:00.001-07:00

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

2010-10-22T04:29:00.000-07:00

“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

2010-10-16T03:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-08T07:19:00.001-07:00

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.

How low can you go?

2010-09-25T03:57:00.001-07:00

Another week, another few hours rehearsing lovely Shakespeare music. I’m actually starting to feel a bit antsy. I’m not used to Oriana rehearsing music for only one concert at a time. Last year we had so many concerts and request performances packed into our schedule that we were rehearsing for several simultaneously, which was fun but a bit tense. So we’ve learned from the experience and have been all about forward-planning this term, building extra rehearsals into the schedule to allow us to rehearse concerts separately. I’m a bit worried that this means we’ll lose that enjoyable frisson of panic on the day of a concert, when we find a piece in the back of our folders that we haven’t rehearsed (like we did at last year’s Christmas concert). And there won’t be any chance that, come the performance, everyone will suddenly turn to a piece that I haven’t got, leaving me to mime with a strangled grin (last year’s Christmas concert again. That was an exciting concert!). It’s a brave but sensible new world.

It’s good to have the time to work on this Shakespeare programme though, as a lot of the music is pretty hard, with some gorgeous but tough dissonances. And of course, when you’re concentrating on trying to get the harmonies and rhythms right, pitch is the first thing to go. We were sliding like trombones on Wednesday. David-the-Conductor struggled between tactful encouragement and extreme exasperation as we plumbed the depths of our vocal ranges. The sops were giving the altos a run for their money with good strong chest voices, and the Basses were grumbling like drains. David-the-pianist joined in to correct us every time we dropped too far for comfort, and we all did sucking-a-lemon faces each time, but after the tenth occasion it just got dispiriting. Eventually, though, we got to a stage where we were getting the harmonies right, and it was starting to sound magical. “Yes!” shouted David-the-Conductor. “Lovely!” David-the-pianist’s fingers did some frantic flexing on the keyboard, but he managed to restrain himself from joining in, so we may even have been approximately in tune. So it’s starting to feel as though the programme’s coming together, and still three more rehearsals to go. I venture to say this bodes well, but I might just have jinxed us by saying that – we’ve got the Gardner still to rehearse after all. I can feel my tension headache building already.

A little Vaughan Williams

2010-09-25T03:57:00.000-07:00

The comment on last week’s blog from the delightful Mr Mantyjarvi, whose music I’d been blithely discussing, has had three effects on me. Firstly, now that I know he is so knowledgeable about Moomins I am an even bigger fan than I already was. Secondly, I’ve realised – perhaps belatedly – that people might actually read the blog. Which leads me to thirdly, feeling very guilty about being so frivolously rude about Bob Applebaum last week. I do actually really like his “Witches Song”, which is lucky as worked quite a lot on it at this week’s rehearsal. We were trying to nail the scrunchy jazz chords, and it’s starting to sound luscious. Unfortunately, I went to a singing lesson during rehearsal, and while my back was turned the dastardly soprano section volunteered me to hit the tricky solo note at the very end. And I thought they were my friends! I am now applying for a transfer to the Altos, but in the meantime I’m going to get that note if it kills me. I’m doing it for the reputation of amateur singers everywhere!

So let’s talk about a composer that is in no position to sue me if he doesn’t like what I write in the blog – Vaughan Williams and his Three Shakespeare Songs. They’re simply gorgeous pieces, and we’re determined to do them justice in the concert. But they’re also very testing. “Full Fathom Five” is full of cross rhythms which are very difficult not to rush, “The Cloud Capp’d Towers” is an exercise in struggling to keep the pitch up, and “Over Hill Over Dale” is all about unexpected entries and working to stay together. After wrestling with them for a while, it felt as though they were designed to test us in the areas where we’re most likely to trip up. And as it turns out, they were written to do exactly that. Vaughan Williams wrote them for a choir competition festival at the request of Armstrong Gibbs, another Oriana favourite. Initially Vaughan Williams wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea, but then Armstrong Gibbs was taken ill with the flu, and while he was in bed a package arrived bearing the Three Shakespeare Songs and a dedication that he could do with them whatever he pleased. Which is a nice story, but it did rather make me wonder why Vaughan Williams would go to such trouble just because his friend had the flu. Do you suppose he was always so inspired by illness? Perhaps all his pieces were written in reaction to friends’ mild ailments. “A Seasick Symphony”? “Fantasia on the Theme of Tonsilitis”? “Gangrenesleeves?” The mind boggles!

To Miao or not to Miao, that is the question

2010-09-17T05:22:00.000-07:00

If Shakespeare had never lived, as David Jenkins informs us on Timeout.com, Milton would be the national poet, leaving Britain a “thoroughly Protestant nation and more rebellious to boot”. So now we have someone to blame for all the traffic disruption in London caused by the Pope’s visit. Damn you Shakespeare! But on the plus side, Shakespeare has contributed hugely to Britain’s cultural milieu by giving us a reason to visit Stratford-on-Avon, the phrase “blinking idiot”, and (most importantly) a reason for Oriana to get together and sing in St Martin-in-the-Fields on October 14th. We will be singing settings of Shakespeare songs from many and varied composers, and trying hard not to feel like blinking idiots as we “cookoo”, “bubble bubble” and “miao” through them.

We were cookooing and miaoing a lot on Wednesday as we were practicing Applebaum’s versions of the “Witches Song” from MacBeth and “Spring” from Love’s Labours Lost. Those of you who read the blog fervently every week (and apologies for the lack of blog last week by the way – I was having “technical difficulties”) will remember that last time we were practicing Mäntyjärvi’s version of the “Witches Song”. So I was musing a lot this week, in the quiet moments when David-the-Conductor was busy yelling at the other sections of the choir, which of these settings Shakespeare himself would prefer. Do you suppose he’d be swayed by Mäntyjärvi’s blend of Finnish folk and traditional choral sound, or would he prefer Applebaum’s “strongly tonal, though tinged with a jazz sensibility” style of music? Given Shakespeare’s modernist rock-star bent I was leaning very much towards the latter. But then I read Applebaum’s website, where he describes his music in a slightly smug manner as “somewhat challenging for amateurs to learn”. This distinctly put me off him, so I began trying to make a case for Mäntyjärvi. There aren’t many connections between Shakespeare and Finland but what the hell, I can easily make some up. Did you know Shakespeare was half Finnish? Fact!* This is why Hamlet was set in Elsinore, which is almost in Finland (if you ignore Denmark, Sweden and the Baltic Sea – and who among us doesn’t?). And Ophelia was a moomin as well. So the case is clear; Shakespeare would have enjoyed Mäntyjärvi’s Finnish-inflected “Witches Song” the most. Take that Applebaum and your complicated music for amateurs!

You can of course judge for yourself by coming along on October 14th – I believe we will even have score cards for you!

*Not true at all.

New Season - read all about it! Oh, you can't.

2010-09-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

It is a season of mystery and endless possibility! You may have noticed that as yet we have no details of our new season on the website. “But why?” I hear you cry, in your eagerness to get booking tickets for our performances. Because once again Oriana is in negotiations to perform at some interesting and currently secret events! “What could they be, pray tell!” I hear you plead. But we cannot. For we are sworn to secrecy. And even if we weren’t, negotiations are ongoing so the programme isn’t completely finalised. And even if it was, our webmaster has left the choir and we’ve just discovered no-one else knows how to update the season schedule. Ooops.

But anyway, take it from me, we have some corking events coming up this season. And first up is our Shakespeare themed concert at St Martin in the Fields on October 14. We started work on some of the more complicated pieces on Wednesday night, including Four Shakespeare Songs by Mantyjarvi. These are my favourite pieces on the programme, with really exciting dissonant clashes. But we were struggling against the natural desire to resolve them into consonance. “No no no!” David-the-Conductor kept shouting. “It’s all sounding too nice!” We managed to nasty it up a bit by the end, but we all definitely need to work on our vicious streak for next week. Weirdly, the bit we struggled with the most was stamping our feet at the end of the Witches Song. You’d think one nice clean unison stamp wouldn’t require much skill, but we were rubbish at it! It sounded like someone had knocked over the kitchen cabinet. “No, no, it’s one, two, and STAMP on three” instructed David-the-Pianist (David-the-Conductor having been briefly whisked off to a top secret meeting). We all carefully watched him beat the time, but counting to three still proved beyond us on the first attempt. It wasn’t long before we’d managed to nail it though. “One, two, STAMP!” we proudly demonstrated. What progress! Next week we’ll move on to “Heads, shoulders, knees and toes”.

Last Night of the Season

2010-07-03T04:09:00.001-07:00

After a long year we have finally arrived at the Last Night of the Season. Sadly we didn’t finish with Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem, but we did imbibe enough wine to make the last night of the Proms look like a nun’s day out. I had two glasses of prosecco at the break and giggled like a 5-year-old through the entire second half. It wasn’t my fault though, the altos were making me laugh. And the tenors. And basses.

We had lots to celebrate though, so the wine was totally appropriate. It’s been a season packed with concerts, two successful tours, a huge variety of music, and venues ranging from Abbey Road studios to the O2 arena. Along the way we’ve made new friends, discovered new music, fallen in love with some pieces (Martin Mass – superb!) and developed trenchant hatred for others (No 5 in Gardner’s A Burns Sequence - I can’t even say the title for the violent shuddering it induces, but it rhymes with “Oh Missel and I’ll Thumb to Ye”). What a great season, let’s hope next year will be even better!

As every minute of rehearsal time counts in Oriana, we spent this final rehearsal running through the music for the first concert of next season. This will be a repeat of a concert we did a year ago, themed on Shakespeare, so those of us who’ve been in the choir for a while already know the music pretty well. I was delighted to have another go at the Mantyjarvi “Lullaby”, which I just love, and also Vaughan Williams’ Three Shakespeare Songs. The low point was a revisitation of the composer I love to hate – yes, good old Gardner again! I’m only just getting over the horror of A Burns Sequence, but you’ll be delighted to know he wrote A Shakespeare Sequence as well. His Shakespeare songs are for female voice only, and as always with Gardner I really like some and can’t stand the others. We really struggled with O Mistress Mine during last year’s concert, and we made an absolute dogs breakfast of it again on Wednesday night. “That’ll need some work” said David-the-Conductor, with impressive understatement. I’ll happily give it some work, with a hatchet. The men rescued us by entertaining us with a lovely version of a Washburn song (sorry, I’ve forgotten which one, it was late and I was too busy giggling to take notes). And we finished with Appelbaum’s Witches Blues (meow!), a rousing chorus to send us off for the summer.

As there won’t be any choral activity now until September the blog is hereby suspended so it can go on virtual holiday to a cyber-beach. We’ll be back in the first week of September, so thanks for reading these past few months, and hope to see you in the autumn!

End of season concert success

2010-06-26T05:32:00.000-07:00

Our final concert of the season took place last night, and a very good time was had by all! Except possibly the cellist we hired. If you were at the concert you may have had some problems spotting the cellist, but I promise you he was there. He was supposed to be playing continuo for the Monteverdi, along with our usual rehearsal accompanist David-the-Pianist on fake harpsichord. But during the afternoon rehearsal we realised the choir weren’t able to hear the accompanying instruments, so we were struggling to remain in tune with them. We’re usually pretty good at keeping the pitch up during concerts, but we decided on balance that it would just be too excruciating for the audience if we got it wrong, and at the 11th hour David-the-Conductor cut the continuo altogether. David-the-Pianist, who is used to the choir’s freewheeling nature, accepted this with aplomb and joined the bass section instead. The cellist however didn’t feel able to sing, so he ended up (I kid you not) playing the wobbleboard during “Cloudburst”. We must be the only choir in the world that hires professional cellists to play percussion.

The concert went really pretty well. The first half was excellent – the Monteverdi was glorious, When David Heard was magical (even though we ran out of time to practice it, so some of the newer members of the choir were miming!) and we finished with Whitacre’s “Cloudburst” which has to be the most fun piece to perform. Which is lucky, as we had to do it all over again at the end of the concert for recording purposes. David-the-Conductor explained to the audience that we were redoing it because of some technical difficulties with the recording equipment. I have a sneaking suspicion that he had smoothly substituted the term “technical difficulties” for “the damn choir were all over the shop”, but I may just be being paranoid. Certainly we got a passage wrong that we have never got wrong before, but from outside I think it just sounded like extra dissonance – and lets face it, you can never have too much of that in 20th century music. So actually, we improved on the original. The audience was lucky to witness it!

The second half was our Monteverdi and Lauridsen Madrigals Mash-up, which went pretty well - although we were definitely all breathing palpable sighs of relief whenever we turned to the Lauridsen pieces, which we know much better. And we finished with Whitacre’s “Leonardo Dreams” which is another really fun piece. The concert was the first time that we’d ever managed to sing the piece all the way through, and to our delight it went really well. We then did a quick encore of a few “Animal Crackers”, got “Cloudburst” wrong again, and made a sharp exit to the pub. Phew – I think we got away with it!

Monteverdi Madrigal Madness

2010-06-19T04:15:00.000-07:00

I was ill this week and had to give up very early on Wednesday’s rehearsal, which makes it a bit hard to blog about it, but I will hazard a guess at what happened. The choir will have concentrated on the Monteverdi madrigals, and Whitacre’s Leonardo Dreams of his Flying Machine, which are the pieces we’ve rehearsed least. David-the-Conductor will have regularly shouted that we’re not rolling our “r”s enough, and every time another 2 people will have joined in. At the interval there were probably chocolate chip cookies and Penguins with the tea (that may be wishful thinking about the Penguins). When rehearsing Leonardo there was probably some confusion about who would play the finger bells, and an uneasiness while everyone tried not to get picked for the “machine gun” solo at the beginning (my spies have actually informed me that Angela-the-Alto handsomely stepped into the breach and did a marvellous job. Well done Angela!) If this turns out to be broadly correct I clearly don’t need to go to rehearsal any more, I can just simulate it at home.

Monteverdi is definitely a good bet for the main music rehearsed though, as we’ve rehearsed them least. The madrigals are not only stunning pieces of music, but also very important in music history. Monteverdi was a driving force behind the change from Renaissance to Baroque styles, and his collections of Madrigals delineate the change superbly. In fact the fourth and fifth books were the centre of quite some controversy, as Giovanni Artusi (whom I envisage as a sort of medieval Mary Whitehouse) attacked the fourth book as an example of this dreadful new-fangled “modern” music that everyone was being seduced by. He appealed for a return to the traditional principles of Rennaissance. Monteverdi responded in the introduction to his fifth book, in kind of a fence-sitting way. He advocated having a “prima prattica” of following the Renaissance style, but simultaneously having a “seconda prattica” of more modern composition, also known as having your cake and eating it. This indecisiveness is reflected in his love madrigals. They go something like this:

Oh my love, Clarissa, you are buried in a tomb
I will never forget you
I will despair by your tomb for ever and ever
But also, I will try and move on with my life as well
We have to look to the future after all
But of course my heart will remain with you forever, oh sweet Clarissa
Actually can I call you Clarry from now on as Clarissa’s a bit old-fashioned
Hey Nonny No

[NB this may not be a completely faithful translation]

But Monteverdi’s simultaneous backward and forward looking means his music is a wonderful blend of the best of traditional renaissance and newer baroque styles. And we’re combining some of his most stunning madrigals in this concert with works by Lauridsen and Whitacre, who, 400 years after Monteverdi, have gone back to his Renaissance tradition to blend it with their own brand of modern music. It’s such an exciting, passionate mix of music, and I don’t think the choir have ever looked forward to a concert more. Next Friday is going to be a corker!

A glare of publicity

2010-06-08T04:42:00.000-07:00

After the jollies of our tour to Spain last week, we were back into serious business this weekend just gone, with a gig at a charity gala at Hampton Court Palace, in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care and the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation. I was hoping aloud last week that we might get some good celeb spots, and we certainly weren’t disappointed. We got glared at by a veritable panoply of stars! I don’t think they were actually intending to glare – I think they were either trying to look sultry and interesting or were just being distracted from their conversations by the brilliance of our music. And the music was indeed brilliant. We performed a wide variety of difficult pieces in the non-existent acoustic of the garden, and did a superb job of the lot of them, so we were very proud of ourselves.

The gala was sponsored and hosted by Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of Stud House, in the grounds of Hampton Court. We were singing in the garden, and then briefly in the marquee as the guests were coming in to dinner. Unfortunately the traffic was so bad on the way to Stud House that we were very late arriving and had to hussle through our sound check in the marquee. While we were trying to work out the practicalities of squashing us all in front of the small stage, a band arrived on the stage behind us, and we looked around to see Simon le Bon patiently waiting for us to finish. I nearly fell over. When I was 12 I used to love him! He was most gracious about us hijacking his soundcheck though, and didn’t glare at us at all, so now I love him even more.

So who was glaring? Well, Alan Rickman apparently glared quite intensely at us for a while although I completely missed it, which is annoying as I would have loved to have been glowered at by him! I was however glared at directly by David Walliams, so that makes up for it a little. Sophie Ellis-Bextor also looked grumpily in our general direction, although she might just have been wondering whether you could put a dance beat under Whitacre’s “Sleep” (I think that would work).

The non-glarers grabbed our attention more though. Mikhail Gorbachev didn’t wince once at our rusty Russian during Rachmaninov’s Vespers, and there’s a very fine line with Russian between getting it right and sounding like Lloyd Grossman, so his forbearance was appreciated! Hugh Grant came up and laughed openly at us when, dressed in our English black tie finest, we broke into Mike Brewer’s arrangement of a Zulu Freedom Song. And everyone’s favourite celeb, Vanessa Redgrave, came and listened with enthusiasm for a while and actually wandered into the alto section at one point to see what music we were singing. She was kind and appreciative and lovely in every way, and is reputed to have said “This is a real choir”! Vanessa, a free ticket for you to our next concert at Southwark if you want to see what we can REALLY do.

So another weekend of excellent performance is over, and excitingly we actually have a weekend off this coming weekend, so the blog will be back to its usual end-of-the-week timeslot next week.

Tapas in the sun

2010-06-02T03:58:00.000-07:00

The choir tour to Madrid is over, and the majority of the choir and hopefully most of the percussion instruments have wended their weary way back to the UK. I think we managed to smuggle almost all of the handbells out through UK customs, despite their apparent "offensive weapon" status, but I'm sad to tell you that high “E” bell didn’t make it. Even as we speak High E is probably being interrogated by MI6’s specialist musical division. Happily Low E stepped into the breach and we were able to perform Whitacre’s Cloudburst as planned.

We did two concerts, the first in Segovia’s San Juan church which was an atmospheric old church with a fantastic acoustic. The concert was magical, and we came out on a real high. The second concert was in Madrid’s San Sebastian, which was a slightly odd design. The altar was right in the middle of the cruciform, so we had to draw up the choir in front of the altar, toe-to-toe with the audience. This meant we were directly under the massive dome, which amplified our sound with a long reverb, and we’re a pretty loud choir anyway. After the first number the audience got up as one and shuffled into the back rows, except for one cheerful and possibly deaf couple who remained determinedly smiling in the first row for the duration.

The musical highs of the tour were "Cloudburst", which was fantastic fun, and "When David Heard" which was atmospheric and stunning - and in tune! I’m already really looking forward to singing them both again in our Southwark Cathedral concert. Non-musical highlights were too many and varied to enumerate, but I’ll have a go. Singing a couple of promotional songs in the bandstand in Segovia’s central square was fantastic, especially as we irritated a raucous hen party by comprehensively drowning them out. We had two excellent group evening meals, the second in the famous Botin restaurant, where we confused the local troubadours who came to entertain us by forcing them to listen to our drunken rendition of “Calabash Trees” by Bob Chilcott. Dancing to Abba in a perfectly Oriana-sized bar on the last night was great too; and after we got kicked out I was privileged to witness the eminently respectable Andrew-the-new-tenor climbing into a wheelie bin and careering down the slope to the hotel in an attempt to emulate skate-boarding glory. That was definitely my personal highlight!

What a great tour, but now we’re back, and straight into the next challenge. We’re singing at Hampton Court on Saturday at a massive event in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care and the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation. Hopefully I’ll have lots of good celeb-spots for next week’s blog!

The bells, the bells!

2010-05-27T12:23:00.000-07:00

In a first for the blog, I can actually bring you some breaking news! Tour is nearly here – the tour choir is convening in Madrid tomorrow night – and some of the choir have already started their heroic journey across the continent. Neither ash nor strikes shall cause us fear, we charge ahead undaunted. But airport security shall apparently stymie us! It had never occurred to us that the handbells we’re using for Whitacre’s “Cloudburst” might be considered potential weapons, but our first departee with a handbell got stopped at security this morning and forced to switch it to her checked baggage. I’m not sure what they thought she was going to do with it – dong sonorously at other passengers? This has caused some consternation, as many other handbell guardians weren’t planning to check luggage at all, and are now desperately trying to offload their offensive weapons to other members of the choir. Shady transactions are taking place all around London tonight, with Oriana members in large raincoats going “pssssst!” at each other from behind bushes and surreptitiously swapping briefcases. I am not a handbell guardian, but I confess I’m worried. I was planning to take a set of Indian chimes. They’re sitting on my table looking at me innocently, but I don’t know, I suppose the string keeping them together could be used to strangle a leprechaun. Maybe I’d better not risk it.

Anyway, if we’re not all in cells at Heathrow, a large part of the choir will be performing in Segovia on Saturday and Madrid on Sunday – hurray! It’s interesting to see the different balance of a tour choir to the normal choir. The sops, used to being hidden in a vast crowd, have dropped from about 40 to a measly 11, giving us 5 and a half people on each of the two soprano lines. We’re not used to being this exposed, and we’re a bit nervous. “Welcome to our world”, said the tenors’ body language. The tenors have managed to field an impressive 7 – more than did the last concert - and I think there might actually be more altos on tour than there are in the entire choir. They are either the most conscientious part or the most hardened drinkers.

A burst of percussion

2010-05-22T03:54:00.000-07:00

I have fond memories of music class at primary school. The teacher would produce a box of tambourines and spoons and strange clattery things pretending to be musical instruments, and you could just pick them up and shake them enthusiastically in no kind of rhythm and call it music. So easy! I always got the jingly sleighbell thing, but between you and me, I really wanted the guiro. I had guiro envy. My friendship with Georgina Jones nearly ended for ever when she got the guiro and I didn’t.

All of this came flooding back at choir this week as Emma in the first sops, who is a music teacher in her non-choir time, laid out a selection of school percussion instruments. Various members of the choir will be attempting to play these for our performance of Whitacre’s “Cloudburst” at our Southwark concert in June. Cloudburst is a superb piece of complex harmonies and interesting extra sound effects, hence our sudden foray into the world of percussion.

Emma’s borrowed chimes were considerably more professional-looking than the matchboxes and bits of roller skates that passed for musical equipment in my school. They were super-cool triangular metal thingies with an attached clapper. There was a bit of a melee while everyone reverted to their inner 6-year-old and tried to grab a chime. I remembered the distress caused by Guirogate and decided to magnanimously rise above my need to do so, which turned out to be a good call as I then realised some of the chimes actually had to follow a melody. I think that might have been beyond my percussive abilities. Everyone peered at their scores in confusion and tried to shake their chime in time to the music. “Whose got top A?” David-the-conductor asked. No-one had top A. Not to be thwarted, David produced a bright pink mini-handbell that played approximately the right note and tried to hand it out to the tenors, who all shifted uncomfortably in their seats. This was clearly a bridge too far even for the campest of them. Luckily an alto came to the rescue. “G#!” cried David. Everyone peered around for a G#. “There definitely is a G#” muttered Emma, but G# had clearly lost their nerve. Out came another handbell. We proceeded laboriously through the chime melody, struggling to keep the pace even. It was like church bell-ringing on a drunk Sunday afternoon. Then came the freestyle section where the chimes could play as they wished – hurrah! Those of us who were chimeless began to simulate the sound of rain by clicking our fingers. “Now start slapping your thighs” ordered David. We obviously couldn’t do this and read the music at the same time, so down went the music. The people with chimes were going mental, while the rest of us were crouched over, slapping our thighs and trying to read our music off the floor. Suddenly the soprano line rose to the stratosphere. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to hit top B from a bent-legged crouch but believe me, it’s not easy. I think a couple of us made it, but it definitely wasn’t me as I was laughing too hard. I can honestly say I’ve never had so much fun at choir. Can we do percussion every week? I’ll buy my own guiro and everything.

How long would it take to walk to Madrid?

2010-05-15T02:57:00.000-07:00

One of the most enjoyable parts of choir life is going on tour abroad - singing fantastic music to confused but happy local audiences, and then partying till we fall over. Friendships are formed, photos are taken, light blackmail is undertaken over said photos once we return to the UK. But getting there isn’t normally as much of a challenge as our end of May tour to Madrid is shaping up to be. The volcanic ash situation just hasn’t caused enough uncertainty, so BA have decided to really lottery it up by going on strike. A sizeable portion of the choir are flying BA, so it’s quite exciting to see what will actually happen. Will all of the men get stuck at Heathrow, and the altos will have to sing bass? If so, will the men enterprisingly form the Terminal 1 Male Voice Choir to entertain captive audiences of stranded travellers, leading to a reality TV show? What if David-the-conductor doesn’t make it – will we each have to take turns conducting? I may have to fake a broken arm if so. Two broken arms. And a leg. That should be enough to get me out of it.

Anyway if we do get to Madrid somehow we’ll be singing bits of music from the forthcoming June concert, but also, I’m delighted to say, bits from the Leighton and Martin masses we did back in March in freezing St Andrews church. Hurray! Memories of the extreme cold came flooding back as I opened the Leighton, and I shivered fondly with nostalgia, and then shivered a bit more with trepidation as we turned to the 5/4 hosannas which gave us such grief last time. We sang through the hosannas again to refresh ourselves, and it was a game attempt, but I don’t think we were singing in anything approaching 5/4 – it was kind of a combination of 6/4 and plainchant. We’ll be fine once we’ve got back into the swing of it though. Rather more worrying was the Benedictus. I know I only sang it two months ago, but I have absolutely no memory of it whatsoever. None. And the rest of the sops were all over the place too, even though it’s an easy sing. I was definitely there in the concert, and I’ve got notes in the score, and they’re in my own handwriting and everything. So the only possible explanation is that there was a Men in Black moment in the concert, and we had our memories wiped after witnessing an alien invasion. But perhaps I shouldn’t blow the whistle like this! If there’s no blog entry next week, I will have been kidnapped and taken off for re-education. Please inform Amnesty International.

Mystic Madrigali

2010-05-07T04:35:00.000-07:00

Our coming concert at the end of June sees a welcome return for an Oriana favourite – Lauridsen’s Madrigali. The Madrigali, or “Fire songs” are based on poems that describe the pain of unrequited love, and the music depicts this through some gorgeous dissonant clashes. They’re very satisfying to sing, and we’ll be pairing them with Monteverdi settings of the same poems so there will be some exciting contrasts of style.

Difficult though the Madrigali are, we did them in concert only last year, so lots of us already know them well and hopefully they’ll only need a bit of tweaking to get them back up to scratch. There was some struggling at this week’s rehearsal to maintain the semitone clashes without blending into one note – the basses in particular were being seduced into consonance by the altos – but by the end of rehearsal we were getting the notes well under control. So now the most challenging bit is trying to fit all the words in to the musical line. The songs are pretty fast, and my Italian is restricted to “ciao” and “cappuccino”, so I was rather letting the side down on clear diction. My contributions were along the lines of “ng, ng ng ng ng –o-re, ng, ng ng ng ng - vi-o”. But I made up for my shortcomings by ostentatiously rolling every “r” for a good two bars, and I’m pretty sure David-the-Conductor was fooled.

Lauridsen is an American composer of Dutch parentage, born in 1943. According to “Choral Music in the Twentieth Century” Lauridsen is the most frequently performed American choral composer, but also, rather surprisingly, the only American composer who can also be called a mystic. I’m not sure what that means. Do you suppose he has the gift of prophecy through composition? To test the theory I have been painstakingly translating the first Madrigal, which goes as follows:

“Ov’e, lass’, il bel viso?” (oy vey, lass, do you take visa?)
“Dov’il mio sol?” (Is that my Dover Sole?)
Lasso, che velo s’e post’inanti et rend’oscur’il? (Alas, what veil drapes itself and renders the heavens dark?)

Wow – hold the presses - Mystic Morten has predicted the ash cloud! And a day in the life of a kosher restaurant in York! Truly he is the new Nostradamus. So get your tickets for our concert now – not only will you hear great music, you’ll also learn the future.

Highs of life, and lows of pitch

2010-04-30T04:32:00.000-07:00

David-the-pianist, our rehearsal accompanist, is used to maintaining an Olympic calm in the face of hideous flatness. Only his eyebrows give away his inner angst, knitting themselves into interesting patterns as we wander through the lesser known parts of the harmonic series. And most of the time a gentle hint from the direction of the piano is enough for us to get back in tune. But at this weeks’ rehearsal the eyebrows were working overtime, as we sang Whitacre’s “When David Heard” resolutely, resoundingly flat. It must be the only piece in our repertoire where we resist the help of the piano and just get flatter. I don’t know whether to blame the continual repeated notes or the odd unexpected leaps more, but the whole piece is like an academic exercise in how to make a choir drop pitch. Luckily this is the third time I’ve done the piece with Oriana, and I know from experience that come the concert it will be an absolute show-stopper. In fact I urge you to get your tickets for our Southwark Cathedral concert now because it will be glorious. But getting through the Strangled Cat Chorus stage of rehearsal is always a bumpy ride!

Happily we only had time for an initial sing-through last night, because we were short on time due to the choir’s annual AGM. We all did our best to look intelligent and knowledgeable through the discussion of audits and accounts, and then patted ourselves on the back as we looked back on the last year with pride. What a year it’s been - concerts in the Barbican, Royal Festival Hall, Abbey Road studios and even the 02 Arena! And there’s lots more great things coming up. Our end of season concert at Southwark Cathedral is going to be fantastic, and before that we’re going on tour to Madrid, and doing a charity concert at Hampton Court in aid of Marie Curie and the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation. So last night was a very satisfying recap of choir activities. In fact the only big concern was highlighted by David-the-Conductor, who pointed out that we haven’t been socialising enough at the choir’s favoured three Cs social events – there hasn’t been a ceilidh, curry night or cabaret for ages. To redress the balance, I feel we should attempt every social event we can think of beginning with C. I would like to suggest a night of Crotcheting, with Coffee and Crudités served as refreshment. Camping and Caravanning went down well as options in the pub last night. We also decided on Curling, a Cheese and Cider evening, and a full day of Clarkson-baiting (standing outside Jeremy Clarkson’s house making nasty comments about his cars). Hopefully some of the choir will begin Courting, (and choir couples Colin and Carol, and Cat and Cen, deserve an accolade for setting such a fine thematic example). And I suppose, if we get a bit of extra time, we might indulge in the occasional bit of Choral singing.

A glorious concert in St John's Smith Square

2010-04-25T04:04:00.000-07:00

The blog’s a little bit late this week because I was didn’t want to jinx us before last night’s concert by being all optimistic about how amazing it was going to be. And it was indeed amazing! Unusually for us, we had a full orchestra – the Brandenburg Sinfonia – for this concert. We had our rehearsal with them yesterday afternoon and – the noble efforts of our rehearsal pianist notwithstanding – hearing the orchestral accompaniment really brought the music to life. In the Gardner Burns Sequence in particular, the orchestra’s wider variety of sounds meant we could really nail the different styles of each piece. Come the concert there were a couple of tentative “is it us now?” entries (where everyone does come in, but very quietly), but mostly we were confident and able to really perform the pieces. And I got through “Whistle and I’ll come to ye” without grimacing or spitting, which I think was a good effort. Although my nightmare of having to do it as a recurring encore in the future may be about to come true, as one of our singing teachers has already commended our performance of it. Eeeeeek.

The second half was devoted to the Puccini Messa di Gloria, which I have now come to love. Puccini wrote it at the age of 18 as his graduation piece from college, and he seems to have been a bit of a hellraiser in these teenage years. In my internet surfing about the piece I came across a marvellous story (which I really hope is true) that he played the organ in his local church throughout his teens, and he would sell the pipes for scrap metal and then hide his criminal activities by writing music that didn’t use those particular pipes! Isn’t that great? Using your talent for evil!

So looking at the Messa di Gloria as a piece written by a tearaway kid means you see it in a whole different light. It’s really glorious music, full of ideas and charm, and feels really Italian in the sense that it reminds you of that most quintessential Italian music, by which all other Italian music is judged – the music from The Godfather. (Look scandalized on behalf of the Italian masters if you like, but you know it’s true!) But the Messa seems to get more sparse as you go through. The Gloria is superb, at 17 minutes long and packed full of great music and contrasts. But then the movements get shorter right up to what should be the grand finale of the piece – the Agnus Dei – which comes in at a measly 2 minutes 20 seconds, and features mainly the soloists with only a couple of hasty entries from the choir. It was beautiful music, and when we’d finished singing it the audience started applauding enthusiastically, but we were all looking around our feet to see if a huge final choral movement had accidentally fallen out of our folders. I can’t help but think of a delinquent Puccini, the night before graduation, drinking away the ill-gotten gains of his latest pipe-selling spree, then waking up the next morning with a mega hangover shrieking “Mamma Mia, my deadline! And I haven’t written an Agnus Dei! Okay, quick, Miserere, ummm, Miserere again, oh god I forgot the choir, give them a Donna Nobis Pacem, okay done!” Still, pretty damn impressive for a schoolboy.

Gardner: love or hate?

2010-04-17T06:06:00.000-07:00

There are many composers that I love and many that I hate, but in John Gardner I have a composer that I both love and hate simultaneously. Every work I’ve heard, without exception, has generated one of only two reactions in me: “ooh, lovely!”, or, “blimey, I’ve accidentally walked into a hoedown.” It’s love or hate, nothing in between. He’s the Marmite of Music.

In fact they should put that on his website, which doesn’t seem to go in for too much hyperbole. It kicks off by describing him, not as England’s most interesting living composer, most unusual living composer, or even most under-rated living composer. No, he is simply “England’s oldest living composer” (and even then only “almost certainly”). Wow what an accolade! Maybe they’re scared Tavener will sue.

We’ve done quite a few Gardner pieces since I joined the choir, and he does seem to be one of the most divisive of composers when it comes to general opinion. A Burns Sequence, for example, is mostly on the “ooh lovely” side of the Great Marmite Divide, but some people find the unstable rhythms and keys quite frustrating and unnecessarily difficult to follow. Gardner freewheels through cross-rhythms and unrelated chords with gay abandon, and it often feels like we’re trundling along somewhere behind, as though we were scared of speeding in a built-up harmony. But personally I rather enjoy the challenge of the quick changes. I especially love the hymn-like first and last pieces where the metric form means we have to be absolutely together. Conversely, my least favourite piece in the sequence is the simplest one, the utterly twee and vile (or fresh and engaging, depending on your viewpoint) “Whistle an’ I’ll come to ye”. OOOOOOOOH I hate it! My fingers are involuntary curling even as I type. It’s a folk song about young love (bleurgh) where the ladies have to sing coquettishly (double triple bleurgh) while the men whistle humorously in accompaniment (actually I do quite like that bit). We struggled with the style a bit at rehearsal on Wednesday. “Convince me that you fancy this lad” entreated David-the-conductor, on what felt like our hundredth attempt. I tried, but I may not have been utterly convincing. It’s hard to be coquettish when you’re wishing you were running the lad through with a pitchfork. I don’t think I was the only one struggling either, as David declared us all lesbians at one point. I think we got there in the end, but my greatest fear is that we’ll give it our all on Saturday, and it will go down so well that our loyal audience will begin insisting we do it as an encore at every single concert. I would actually rather bath in Marmite.

Our biggest venue yet

2010-04-08T04:25:00.000-07:00

The Easter weekend was, for me, a weekend of both exhilaration and disappointment. Disappointment because, once again, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick failed to make it into the Classic FM Hall of Fame. But exhilaration, because Star Wars in Concert was fab! The O2 arena was an amazing venue and the orchestra – the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra - very slick indeed. (And with a nice line in sarcasm too: “Do you play all of these instruments?” one of our basses was overheard asking the percussionist. “No, we just set some of them up for fun” came the reply.) We were singing two pieces in three concerts, plus the sound checks, so we had several goes at getting the pieces right. We lulled the orchestra into a false sense of insecurity by being really quite dreadful at the first sound-check, but it was just the effect of a different conductor and an unfamiliar acoustic. Once we’d settled down we threw ourselves into John Williams’ space opera style with gusto, chanted through the Welsh-Sanskrit of the choral pieces to a demonic crescendo, while behind us on the giant screen Lord Vadar came into being! How exciting to spend a weekend invoking the forces of darkness.

We also got to meet C3PO himself, Anthony Daniels, who was the consummate professional and came to visit us unbidden to give us a quick pep talk. We asked him if we could get a group photo and he promised to pop back in the following day to do it, and was as good as his word. Unfortunately by that time we’d all forgotten about it. “Photo time!” he called gaily, striding into the dressing room. We all looked at each other with varying degrees of panic. Our usual photographer was out of the room - did anyone else actually have a camera? While his back was turned we compared mobile phone pixel counts and rummaged frantically through the pockets of all the choir members who were out having a coffee. How could we possibly confess to not having cameras for our important photo shoot?! Just as we were trying to rustle up a sketch artist and some charcoal, our efforts procured us four face-saving cameras. “Ratamah!” we all shouted into the camera with nonchalant grins, while Anthony remained blissfully unaware at the front. Phew, what a relief!

Star Wars: the choir strikes back

2010-04-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

A long time ago (well, Wednesday), in a rehearsal room far far away .....

It is a period of mild consternation. The evil O2 galactic empire has discovered that rebel choir Oriana plans to converge on their Death Star – disguised as the O2 arena –to take part in Star Wars In Concert this weekend. To thwart the rebel’s plans, the O2 has forced the closure of the Jubilee Line – a magical conduit through London with the capacity to ship choir, orchestra and 20,000 audience members into battle in Greenwich.

Undaunted, Oriana’s leaders have stolen secret plans to London’s transport network from the fabled oracle tfl.gov.uk. Pursued by transport workers and probably some tourists, the choir will race through London on their ship – the Thames Clipper – and take the agents of the O2 by surprise. But the rebels have not accounted for the movie projection during the concert, which means that the lights will go out. The choir will no longer be able to see their copies, and will have to use the Force (of memory) to overcome the Dark Side (of the stage). Rebel leader Tenor-one Ken-obi (also known as Ken in the first tenors) will gamble all in a last-ditch attempt to teach the rest of the choir Welsh-Sanskrit – the language in which the piece is written. “Korah! Matah! Korah! Ratamah!”, he will intone. “Cora! Martha! Cora! Agatha!”, we will chant in reply. Can Oriana possibly prevail? Tune in next week to find out!

The sectionals in Glee look like more fun than ours

2010-03-27T04:39:00.000-07:00

If you’re a tenor everybody wants you (chorally speaking). Tenors are a rare breed. As a tenor, you must surely feel appreciated, needed, perhaps even loved. If you miss a concert you will be abandoning your few loyal comrades in their hour of need. The rest of the choir will notice your absence, and throw uneasy glances at the space in the ranks where you should be. You make a DIFFERENCE. If you’re a soprano, however, your section stretches back to the horizon. You could get lost in the jungle for 6 months and when you emerge, staggering and traumatised, back into the choral ranks, people will throw you a glance and wonder if you’re up to date with your subs. You are part of a vast collective of strangers, tied together only by the need to chant approximately the same line. We’re like the Borg, basically. However the one real benefit of being a lady in the world of choral singing is that when we have sectionals (where we split into sections to rehearse separately), we’re too huge and amorphous a mass to move with any speed, so we get to stay in the nice bright main hall while the men have to troop off to the poky little chapel downstairs. Heh heh heh!

Sectionals this week gave us a chance to notebash some of the Puccini Messa di Gloria. It’s a really fun piece, and well-rounded with some lovely tunes. Don’t listen to The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music, which rather dismisses it with the cold one-liner - “Puccini's choral, orchestral and instrumental works, dating mainly from his early years, are unimportant, though the Mass in A-flat (1880) is still performed occasionally”. Blimey, bit harsh. Whoever wrote that had clearly not read Classical.net, which has Puccini writing the Mass in 1860, at the age of 2. That must surely raise its importance in the classical pantheon? In any case, it seems to have been well received at the time of its first performance in 1880, but then forgotten until 1952, when it was rediscovered by the portentous-sounding Father Dante and performed again in Naples to another warm reception. According to the programme notes at the start of our copies, the critics at these two performances – 72 years apart – made strikingly similar comments about the piece. Is this, as the notes hold, a demonstration of the timeless beauty and universal appeal of the Mass? Or did the critic at the second performance sleep in, miss the performance altogether and then search desperately through his newspaper back catalogue, copying the previous review verbatim and rushing it down to the editorial office bare minutes before his deadline? I guess we’ll never know.

The Force was with us

2010-03-20T04:12:00.000-07:00

Choral singing is fabulous, but it can also be a pretty hard slog sometimes, and last Saturday’s pre-concert rehearsal was a good example. We were determined to nail the remaining few tricky bits in both the Leighton and the Martin, which meant a lot of hard work and extreme concentration in a church as cold as the cold cold grave. We froze solid for four grindingly hard hours, wrapped in coats and scarves, bolting as one down High Holborn during the break to form an agonized queue in Cafe Nero. But it was worth it. By the time of the concert we were ready to give it our all. There were a couple of hairy moments – I think I may have done an unintentional solo at one point – but it was atmospheric and at times overwhelmingly beautiful. I got shivers during the Martin Agnus Dei in particular, and it wasn’t due to the cold. Well, not entirely, anyway. And I’m happy to say we Jedi-mind-controlled our way through the tricky Hosannas with great success. Thank you, the Force.
So another concert successfully completed, and we’re straight into the next challenge. Wednesday was spent singing our way through the music for our next Oriana concert in April. We’ll be doing Shicksa ... Schiscka ... sssiska ... something in German by Brahms, Gardner’s A Burns Sequence, and Puccini Missa di Gloria. It feels much more relaxed and lighthearted after the majesty of the last concert, but again really great music. But before that, on Easter weekend we’ll be taking part in the Star Wars extravaganza at the O2, singing music from the film scores. We were really hoping this meant singing the theme tune with some random words attached – “Star – WARS – Sta-a-a- AAAAAAAR – wars” - but sadly it appears to be genuinely choral music from the prequels rather than a Singalonga event. But I have high hopes for some improvisation in the bar afterwards.

5 times is bad times

2010-03-12T04:44:00.000-08:00

Call me old-fashioned, but what’s wrong with a nice stable 4/4? We all know where we are with that. If the time signature just stays the same, we can get on and sort out the melody and the harmony without concentrating reeeeeely hard and having to count quavers on our fingers. And seriously, what is it about the word “hosanna” that makes 20th century composers break out in 5-time?? What’s wrong with them? I remember when hosanna was a nice 6/8 word, in my primary school days. Does that really need tinkering with?? It shouldn’t be allowed. And especially, ESPECIALLY, composers should be banned from throwing in the occasional 6-time bar just when we’ve got our heads round counting in 5s! That’s just cruel.

The Leighton is mainly the piece causing this angst, although that doesn’t get Martin off the hook. The rhythm is the only tricky thing now because we’ve sorted the complicated, dissonant harmonies. In fact we’re attacking the discordant clashes with some relish, and I’m even confident that those discordant clashes are AS WRITTEN in the score, something I haven’t always been able to say in my choral career. So all was going well with the Leighton at this week’s rehearsal, and I was particularly psyched to get picked for the semi-chorus singing the beginning of the Sanctus, which I was banging on about last week as the loveliest part of the piece. But then the word “hosanna” approaches, and Kenneth gets his 5/4 hat on. Suddenly the entire choir were all over the place. 5-time is HARD. “Do you want only the semi-chorus to sing this bit too?” the soprano sitting behind me asked David-the-conductor hopefully. I glowered at her as befits such a blatant escape attempt, but she just looked back at me like butter wouldn’t melt. In this situation we did what any choir would do, and resorted to epic Hollywood. “Use the force!” cried David, Yoda-like at his music stand. We felt for the notes with our minds, and, incredibly, the force was with us. Now we just need to retain the force until the concert on Saturday. I’m maintaining it through meditation and some mild ewok-baiting.

Luscious Leighton

2010-03-05T04:19:00.001-08:00

After the glory of Sound and Vision, we came back to earth with a clatter this week when we realised our next concert was only 10 days away. We’re singing Masses for double choir by Frank Martin and Kenneth Leighton. They’re both superb pieces, but pretty complicated and a complete change of style from our recent pop successes, so we’re working super-hard to polish them for performance.

Up to now I’ve been far keener on the Martin than the Leighton, but after a rehearsal devoted to Leighton and lots of listens to the recording, I’m really starting to understand the shape of the piece much more. Leighton was a master of counterpoint, and this mass is no exception. The Sanctus in particular is gorgeous, interweaving the voices in lyrical triplets. And just as it’s lulled us into a soothing false sense of security, in comes the hosanna with tricky crossing entries and changing time signatures to thoroughly wake us up again. The Agnus Dei ramps up the emotional tension, with beautiful solo lines set against the choir exploring its full dynamic range. I was briefly disconcerted when the soprano solo line ended with a jarring slide upwards, but that luckily turned out to be the sound of my train departing King’s Cross. The joys of the i-pod age. And if the music itself isn’t enough to fall in love with the mass, it’s dedicated to a man with the happy name of Herrick Bunney. Hurray!

We must have been struggling to make the change of style, however, because David-the-Conductor went off into ever more extravagant realms of imagery to get us to infuse expression into the music. And we duly came to life. The altos had a good go at being perverted. The basses were positively sinful. We all invoked the exact wave of terror you feel when you’re in a kebab shop and someone runs in and hits you on the head with a bottle and runs away. It was all very appropriate for a Mass setting. I’m not sure I’ll ever see church-going in the same way again.

Robert Plant hit me with his microphone

2010-02-27T02:36:00.000-08:00

Actually that didn’t happen, but it could have! We performed at Cancer Research’s Sound and Vision Event with Robert Plant and Beth Nielsen Chapman on Thursday, and up until Wednesday night I was just concentrating on the music and not especially bothered about the celebrity element. But on Wednesday, as we stood all ranked up on the stage at the iconic Abbey Road Studios for our rehearsal and sound check, with Robert Plant swinging his mic in front of us, I confess I got a bit starstruck. Robert Plant was right THERE! I could reach out and pull his hair! Cool eh?

So Sound and Vision was going to have to be pretty amazing to make up for all the effort, extra rehearsals, memorizing the music, gurning in front of the mirror in an attempt to look good singing, cramming ourselves up together and getting the tape measure out to see how many choir members we could squeeze into our allotted space. And did it live up to expectations? Absolutely! We walked onto a hot, dark stage in front of 400 gig-goers whom we fully expected not to be much interested in the choir. But in fact the atmosphere was electric.

Our two songs with Beth – The Colour of Roses and How We Love (for which Beth played John Lennon’s piano) were faultless and beautifully atmospheric. We also did two Oriana classic pieces just by ourselves. Calabash Trees is probably our most visual performance piece with clapping and clicking interspersed through the singing, so it seemed appropriate for the event. Our other classic – Sleep by Eric Whitacre – had dragged a bit in the Wednesday rehearsal because it needs so much energy and commitment to make it work, and some of the choir didn’t know it that well. But we made a last-minute decision to use the sheet music, and on the night it was magical. Then the high point - Robert arrived on stage to sing two very different pieces with us. Scott Walker’s Farmer in the City was spine-tingling, with Robert intoning soulfully over the slow harmonies of the choir building to a stunning climax. I Bid You Goodnight was a jollier piece with inflections of country, blues, gospel and rock. Robert did some superb improvisation while we popped in with the occasional “good night!” The grand finale was a rendition of My Sweet Lord, on George Harrison’s birthday, for which we were joined on stage by Beth, David Gray and Newton Faulkner. This was our potentially most disastrous number, as we’d had no rehearsal with two of the soloists. And indeed there were a couple of “gulp, just keep smiling!” moments, but it was great fun and by the end the audience was roaring along. This song, along with the others we sang with Robert and Beth, were all in choral arrangements by our conductor David Drummond, and once again he did us proud by providing such exciting arrangements and steering us through the partnership between soloists, musicians and choir. The whole evening was superb, and I think reconfirmed all of us in our commitment to this amazing choir! And as a bonus, we all got a signed CD from Robert. Who could want more?

Who will make it through to Boot Camp?

2010-02-19T04:10:00.000-08:00

Concerned that we might go a whole week without a guest at the rehearsal, David-the-Conductor nobly went skiing this week so we could have Howard-the-Conductor as a guest. It’s always interesting having a guest conductor, as they pick up on different things, throwing the influence of our normal conductor into sharp relief. So for example, Howard-the-Conductor asked us to sing our “ah” sounds in a narrower, darker fashion to make the sound more rounded. A perfectly legitimate style suggestion, but it caused some dubious looks and panicked exchanges of glances. Little did he know he was going against a central Daviddologism – the bright open “ah” sound in an Italianate style. We had a go, but we clearly weren’t comfortable. You’d think we were all from the West Midlands. David should be very proud of how well schooled we all are.

The Sound and Vision event doth approach, and we have an extra rehearsal on Sunday to prepare properly. Unfortunately (and very unusually) we have more people signed up for the concert than we have room for. The choir's policy on concerts is that if you don’t know the music well enough to look up from the copy, you don’t get to sing, so usually numbers naturally reduce. But none of us want to miss out on this event, so everyone is revising frantically. On Sunday we’re actually going to be filmed to catch those with their noses buried in their copies, who might then be asked to step out of the concert if not enough people voluntarily drop out. It feels a bit like the X Factor. I have an extra handicap when it comes to visual presentation, though, as I happen to know I look like a rabbit in the headlights when I’m singing. If you ever see the DVD of Beth Neilsen Chapman’s concert in St Pauls, I’m the one behind Beth looking really worried. So as well as revising the music I’m also spending time in front of the mirror trying to look nonchalant. I could cope with losing out on the concert because I didn’t know the music well enough, but imagine getting dropped for giving off a general air of doom!

Week 5 - A guest and some steering

2010-02-12T05:30:00.001-08:00

Our rehearsal this week was again enlivened by a guest – Beth Nielsen Chapman popped in to run through some songs ready for the Sound and Vision event on February 25th. We’ve worked with Beth before – in fact my very first Oriana concert was a charity concert with Beth in St Pauls Cathedral, which was an amazing event. So we’re excited to have the opportunity to work with her again, and try some new material. It was possibly a bit dull for our normal accompanist though, who was ousted from his seat at the piano by Beth. But he still contributed to proceedings by reading the paper in a very musical way.

As there’s still an embargo on mentioning the music, I decided to attend my first ever steering group meeting this week to give me something else to write about. Organising the choir in terms of concerts, venues, rehearsals, finances, subscriptions, tours, marketing etc takes a lot of work and decision-making behind the scenes, but the choir is very egalitarian and anyone can go along to a steering group meeting and put in their opinion. I would love to say I was a valuable asset to the meeting, but actually I just got steadily drunker on the wine and all stroppy about David-the-conductor nicking my chocolate fingers. (He was taking them off my PLATE! Honestly!) Item 4 on the agenda was an item about PR, and someone carelessly mentioned that effective PR depended on being sure we knew the direction the choir wished to go in. There was a collective indrawn breath, and some people may have turned ashen with terror. One longstanding member of the committee pointed out that whenever this gets mentioned there are more opinions than attendees. And sure enough, two hours later we were still arguing and the wine was almost gone. At this point I had to leave to get my train, so I’m still not sure what direction the choir is going in. But hopefully it’s going there in less of a zigzag than my walk back to the tube station. In any case, I have developed a new respect bordering on awe for the people who have to make those decisions and try and keep everyone happy. Blimey.

2010-02-09T04:45:00.000-08:00

As Mystery-Meister, I shall now offer the solution to one puzzle with one hand while simultaneously unfolding a deeper conundrum with the other. It’s like an episode of “Lost”. I can now non-exclusively reveal that our Mystery Guest last week was Robert Plant – true rock legend, amazing musician and very nice man. We are honoured to have been asked to sing with Robert and Beth Nielsen Chapman at Cancer Research UK’s Sound and Vision event at Abbey Road Studios. However, what we will be singing is still confidential, while we work the programme out. So rather than give anything away, I shall be performing the rest of this blog in mime. (to keep yourself entertained while I'm doing that, please read the information below on the event and how to bid for the last few remaining tickets)

VIP tickets to meet David Gray & unique music memorabilia... Sound & Vision's eBay Auction is now live
Cancer Research UK's unique music event at Abbey Road Studios on February 25th is sold out, but launching today an eBay Sound & Vision auction is offering you a chance to bid for the last few remaining tickets to see Newton Faulkner, David Gray, Beth Nielsen Chapman, the Oriana Choir and the legend that is Robert Plant inside the studios which the Beatles made world famous.

Plus, you can bid for exclusive music memorabilia including signed drum skins, guitars and handwritten lyrics from rock legends including Clapton, Kaiser Chiefs, Bob Dylan and many more. All money raised will go towards Cancer Research UK's lifesaving work.

Bid now at www.soundandvisionebay.com

Wk 3 - the Mystery Guest Round

2010-01-29T05:13:00.000-08:00

Oh the horror – not content with our last two weeks of audio recording, this week someone foisted a video camera on me and asked me to take some footage of the rehearsal. Why do people choose me for these things? I can’t work anything invented after about 1750, and even if I could I have all the visual acuity and artistic flair of a toaster. I think I got some good footage of the floor, my left leg, an extreme close-up of Emma sitting next to me, the inside of the lens cap. And when I finally managed to point the camera at something a reasonable distance away I’d been filming for about 10 minutes before I realised I hadn’t pressed “record”. For heaven’s sake.

Anyway, the reason we were attempting to record some of the rehearsal was because the choir was joined by some mystery guests. Any good blog should have an air of intrigue about it, so the identity of our guests (and indeed the titles of the pieces) shall not be revealed at this time! But the choir were very excited to be singing with a genuine rock legend, accompanied on drums and the hurdy gurdy. And there’s a sentence I never thought I’d say. Of course we regularly sing with classical soloists, but singing more popular styles of music with soloists brings a very different set of challenges, as the music tends to be more flexible and open to improvisation. So we have to stay together as a choir but also flex to fit in with the singer’s interpretation of the song. Happily David-the-conductor is practiced at managing this transition, and he wheeled us through the sticky patches with aplomb.

We started by challenging our mystery rock legend to an acoustic sing-off of Mystery Piece Number One, although as there was only 1 of him and 80 of us, the choir had a slight edge. But after a quick game of Hunt the Microphone the balance was redressed, and we began to work together well. We spent most of the rehearsal working on “Mystery Piece Number One” and “Mystery Piece Number 2” – which took us through realms of bluesy folky chorally poppy rocky bluegrassy spiritually celticy fusion type music. It was all a long way away from last week’s 20th century mass settings, but by the end of the rehearsal we were making a fantastic sound and blending effortlessly. We left on a high, congratulating ourselves on our versatility. This is going to be a really exciting season for performances!

week 2 - settling in

2010-01-22T01:06:00.000-08:00

This week we spent some of the rehearsal consolidating and refining the work we’d done last week, as well as sight-singing our way a bit further into the longer pieces. Our conductor David had revised his arrangement of the Mystery Piece from last week, so we went for another recording of that. The Soprano 1s were ready for the entry we’d messed up last week, humming it to each other beforehand with meaningful glances. As it approached we nudged each other, leaned forward in our eagerness, took a collective breath …. and just as we were about to launch confidently into our note, David halted the rest of the choir and told us he’d cut that bit. Thwarted! But we would have been brilliant, I can assure you.

We also spent more time on the Frank Martin Mass, really trying to nail the style and phrasing. It’s such a beautiful piece that we must do it justice when we come to sing it in concert. Frank Martin was an ice hockey player for the Boston Bruins, or so I thought until I realised I’d clicked on the wrong Wikipedia link. In fact he was a Swiss composer with a long career spanning much of the 20th century. The Mass is one of his earlier compositions and shows his love of chromaticism and the influence of Bach, his favourite composer. In the 1930s, after the Mass was written, Martin began to incorporate Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique into his style, while retaining his sense of tonality. In fact, Wikipedia insists that his preference for lean textures and his habitual rhythmic vengeance are the furthest possible remove from Schoenberg’s hyperromanticism. I don’t think that’s true. I think being one of the few ambidextrous shooters in the national hockey league would have been a bit further away.

Start of a new year

2010-01-20T05:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the inaugural Oriana blog! We all hope that this is going to be a fantastic year for the choir, with lots of great music covering a vast range of musical styles, from Monteverdi to choral arrangements of pop songs. The variety and quantity of the music we perform, and the flexibility this asks of us, is one of the reasons Oriana is such an exciting choir. And although when I first joined the “excitement” regularly tipped over to some frantic rehearsing as the concerts approached and yet more pieces appeared, I’m now very used to us pulling it out of the bag by the time the concert arrives!

In true Oriana style, we're still finalising the programme for our early spring concert - largely because we're still being inundated with invitations to sing. So last week, our first rehearsal back after Christmas (and an unscheduled snow break), we tried out a lot of music, ranging from Frank Martin’s glorious Mass for two choirs, to our conductor’s own arrangement of a Beth Neilsen Chapman song. The sight-reading of the choir has really improved since I joined, and we were singing so well that our conductor spontaneously decided to record a piece – his arrangement of A Mystery Piece by A Mystery Author – to refer to while programme planning. Which is of course where it all went wrong, and much as I hate to admit it, it was us in the Soprano 1s that let the side down! We were fine until the last page, when we got an entry so gloriously wrong we had to stop and try again. And again. And again. While the little electronic “recording” light shone at us in a censorious manner. If the recording ever sees the light of day we’ll just have to blame the snow. But by next week, of course, we will be note perfect!