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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Roundabout, roundabout, the traffic goes….”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Anyone else sensing some raised eyebrows at this point?

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

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

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

Ooooh, saxy!

What do London and Florence have in common?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concert schmoncert. There are far more important things afoot!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The unknown history of Scarlatti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS the Handel/Scarlatti keyboard duel is actually true.

Oriana goes on record, and Christmas finally ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starlight of Wonder in a Christmas Rainbow

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

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

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?

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

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

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!

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

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

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 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!

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

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

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?

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)