Monthly Archives: February 2011

Tomorrow never comes: but the Crypt Concert will!

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That’s it! The final two rehearsals this week are over, and arrangements are in place for tomorrow’s Crypt Concert.

On your marks...

Since last Tuesday, all the rehearsals have been without a piano; and we’ve found we no longer need it. This is a tremendous boost for the group. And now, after the unkind and spartan acoustics of the lecture theatre and OTE rooms in which we’re used to rehearsing, the next time the group invokes a chord, it will be in the richly reverberant acoustics of the Crypt. After all the hard work, it will be a fine reward: we just have to make sure we’re not overwhelmed by the sound, and forget all the discipline and the nuances we’ve worked to achieve.

The challenge with rehearsing and performing in the Crypt on the day of the concert, for the conductor at least, is to pace the pieces – and the programme as a whole – to take account of the tremendous sonic possibilities offered by the Crypt. We get a short time to sing through the pieces in the afternoon, before the performance in the evening, and very quickly both conductor and choir have to adapt to the new acoustic, to allow sufficient time for chords to die away and to pace phrases so that words and quicker passages of notes aren’t lost.

It’s a very steep learning curve on the day: but we’re ready for it. Here we go…

Nearly there…

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With only a week to go before the Crypt Concert, the Chamber Choir are starting to hit their stride. It’s interesting how, on two consecutive days, you can have to completely contrasting rehearsals. Tuesday night was hard work – the end of a long day for many of the students – and the Jackson and Macmillan are difficult pieces.

A second rehearsal on the following Wednesday, however, was a really tonic; gathered in the round in the old OTE rehearsal room, we had our first complete rehearsal without any piano accompaniment, and worked on all the pieces we’ve (I’ve ?!) neglected whilst concentrating on the more challenging repertoire.

And what a fillip it was: everyone came out of the rehearsal on a real high; flying completely solo, with no piano-safety-net, confirmed that we’re nearing our best.

The final rehearsals loom this week: with the impetus of Wednesday behind us, they should fly by. We’ve actually started to become excited about the concert now, a sure sign that we’re becoming more confident in the music, and can start thinking about really performing the pieces rather than simply singing them through.

Roll on Friday!

That was a week, that was…

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Nearly all the altos...

A long and hard-worked choral week, last week. With less than two weeks to go until the Chamber Choir’s Crypt Concert, we had a longer than usual rehearsal on Tuesday night, and the choir also had their second workshop day on Saturday. The Cecilian Choir suffered a blight of illnesses and looming course deadlines to be rather decimated at their Thursday session, which meant the planned rehearsal of looking at new repertoire had to be shelved: with so many members missing, it’s not worth looking at new pieces, better to wait until the group is near to capacity.

Saturday was a very long day, but an extremely useful one. Looking at the more difficult pieces in greater detail makes for long and tiring rehearsal periods, so the more challenging pieces were alternated with less difficult works, in order to provide some respite from part-by-part note-bashing and building pieces in sections. Credit to the choir: we covered eight pieces in the entire day, which is a very good work-rate indeed. And that doesn’t even include the warm-up piece, a brief arrangement I’ve made of Rusted Root’s Send Me On My Way, familiar these days as part of the soundtrack to the animated film, Ice Age.

The state of the tenor

With the concert date so close, I am playing even less closed-score accompaniments to the pieces, to get the choir used to singing without the support of the piano beneath them; throwing in the odd bar to check intonation or highlight an important part is really all I want to be doing at this stage. Some of the more difficult pieces needed more than this, but we all felt we’d achieved greater confidence with some of the works, especially the Tippett Gwenllian which offers no vertical logic at all; the voice-parts only really come together in the final three bars.

Bass desires...

We took several of the pieces out of the rehearsal room and into the foyer of the building itself; the lecture theatre in which we rehearse offers little supportive resonance, and I wanted the group to be able to sing in an acoustic with a little more reverberation; the foyer, whilst no church nave, is still a marked improvement over the lecture room. Suddenly, you could hear a little bloom around the colours of the Macmillan; as one of the basses remarked, “Gosh, it’s nice to hear the other voices for a change!” Rehearsing in tiered rows is great for visibility, but makes it difficult for the singers to hear other voice-parts.

The Sopranos...

So, a long week. Work still to do, but things are starting to come off the page really well; the English madrigals are virtually leaping out of the score, and the rich harmonies of the Jackson Edinburgh Mass are starting to become more secure. The clock is ticking…

Mozart and Saint-Saens: the face-off

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As a companion and a contrast to the Saint-Saens setting of the Ave Verum Corpus, the Cecilian Choir today began rehearsing Mozart’s setting of the same text. Two very different treatments of the text: Saint-Saëns’ quite straightforward response to the words, Mozart’s much more lyrical and impassioned. I find programming two contrasting settings of a piece of text to be a interesting feature of concert-planning; each throws up facets of the other that listeners might not have otherwise noticed, or be able to compare a setting they might already know with one they’ve not heard before.

We gathered in the round – Circle Time! – to sing the Saint-Saëns, and also to re-visit the plainchant ‘Ubi Caritas’ and Duruflé’s setting from last week. We took the plainchant more slowly than we have done before; I find that slowing pieces down just a little opens up a conversely larger amount of space in music – there’s time to really feel the phrases finish, to let the notes die away in a resonant acoustic before moving on. Getting the choir to stand in a circle really makes for a rich sound; suddenly, people can hear and relate to other voice-parts moving that they hadn’t previously really been aware of; they also feel more a part of the collective whole, rather than standing strung out in two lines as we are when we are seated in rehearsal.

We’ve now got so much sheet music that we’ve had to resort to folders for everyone to be able to keep all their music together: a sure sign that the choir are able to work swiftly through repertoire and a tribute to the ease with which they pick new pieces up quickly; good news, indeed!

Singing spirits: Finzi, Skempton and Vaughan Williams

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You’d have thought persuading the gentlemen of the choir to sing in a lusty and bawdy fashion would be no problem. The opening of the setting of Mother, Make My Bed which I’ve written for the concert starts with a rambunctious repeated pattern for the tenors and basses, which needs to be delivered in not quite a thigh-slapping manner, but not far off. And yet…they were terribly polite and mannered about it; it was far too refined. More loose living before next week, chaps, maybe ?!

Finzi finesse

It was back to England this week, after last week’s rehearsal of Scottish pieces, and a chance to dance with Finzi’s My Spirit Sang All Day. This piece is a complete joy, full of life and bursting with sheer delight in its harmonic revelry. It’s also the last new piece to prepare for the end of the month (apart from the encore, should we need one, which is a popular favourite that we can learn at the drop of a hat nearer the time); from now on, it’s all consolidation, which makes me feel an awful lot better!

Whenever I start to become nervous about the concert – it’s a big programme, with challenging works, in an awe-inspiring venue – I should just get the choir to sing the Skempton Cloths of Heaven, and all shall be well. We looked at if for the third time last night (that spreadsheet I wrote about keeping earlier is really starting to pay dividends – I can see which pieces we’ve neglected in a trice!), concentrating now on balancing the chords and making sure all the lovely semitone clashes between the inner voices are brought out, or making the sure the basses’ sustained pedal notes can be heard. The basses are, at several points, the driving force behind the emotional impact of the piece; they either underpin the gently breathing harmonies with a solid pedal-note, or at crucial points rise up over an octave to really push the texture upwards.

Although I’m endeavouring now to try and provide as little support on the piano as possible, to get the choir accustomed to singing without any accompaniment, there’s a danger that the pitch can drop and you can end up a good semi-tone lower at the finish, something we’ll have to work on improving.

We revisited the Vaughan Williams songs to finish the rehearsal, endeavouring to impart a sense of rhythmic vitality into the sprightly ‘Over hill, over dale,’ whilst contrastingly making sure the bell-like effects of ‘Full fathom five’ were working. The chords struck in the four-part divisi sopranos throughout the opening section need to begin percussively with a crisp ‘d’ on the words ‘ding’ and ‘dong.’ The altos really showed themselves to be solid masters of the beat, holding the straight crotchet beats against the triplet rhythms in the other voices: I’m beating with one hand in six and with the other in four, so it’s certainly a piece to keep everyone on their toes, including me…

(Preview tracks via LastFM).