End of season concert success

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

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

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

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!

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

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?

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.