Tag Archives: Cecilian Choir

Knocked for six: the Cecilian Choir

It struck me, talking with people after the recent Cecilian rehearsal, that we’ve already got to grips with the best part of six pieces for the concert programme. For a choir that meets for only an hour once a week, and after only four rehearsals, that’s a pretty impressive amount of music.

Fair enough, work still needs to be done on them, but we’ve broken the back of all six works: Tallis, Brahms, Bruckner, Victoria, Lassus and Poulenc. That bodes well for the remainder of the programme, and is a tribute to how quickly the members of the choir can pick pieces up and rehearse them efficiently.

Well done, the Cecilians. The next fourteen pieces will be a piece of cake.

(Joke).

The Austro-German Connection: Brahms and Bruckner

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This week, the Cecilian Choir arrived at the Austro-German part of their programme; pieces by Brahms and Bruckner. Bruckner’s Locus iste is a hardy perennial, and gave the choir a chance to work on their vowel-shapes and sustained phrases. The third section is wonderfully chromatic and harmonically uncertain, ‘irreprehensibilis ist,’ and we strove to capture some of that hesitancy in both the dynamics as well as in the unfolding chromatic lines: there’s a tendency to want to crescendo too soon, but holding back and only reaching mezzo-forte before subsiding back to piano for the reprise keeps the excitement of the passage.

The foggiest notion: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, Friedrich

The Wanderer: Caspar David Friedrich

From Latin text to German: Ach, arme Welt by Brahms, and a chance to develop the linguistic skills of the choir by getting to grips with German. This chorale has some great colours to enhance the text – ‘’Du falsches Welt, du bist nicht wahr (You false world, you are not real) and ‘’Mit Weh und grossem Leiden (with pain and bitter anguish);’’ wonderful lines to sing in German. The most striking aspect of the piece is that, full of impassioned power and dynamics and crescendi, at the last phrase ‘hilf mir, Herr, zum Frieden (help me, Lord, to peace)’’ the piece ends with a diminuendo and ends piano on the final chord. After all the Sturm und Drang of the rest of the piece, it’s a great trick and creates a rapt ending.

We left German Romanticism behind and ended by returning to French neo-Classicism to revisit the first part of the Poulenc that we’d looked at last week. It’s still a terrific piece: I’m delighted we’re learning it.

Poulenc and Victoria: sunlit music

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A gloriously sunlit October day, suitable for rehearsing the first part of Poulenc’s Exultate Deo. This piece really has the light of the sun glowing through it in the second section, ‘Jubilate Deo,’ with Poulenc’s trademark musical language of added-sixth and seventh chords and prominent major second passing notes; there’s a terrific sense of freedom to the piece, both harmonically and rhythmically in the way the time-signatures changes between three, four and five crotchets in the bar.

Circle Time followed, where we broke ranks and stood around in a circle to sing the section of the Poulenc that we’d learned; it was amazing to stand surrounded by the colourful chords and exuberant harmony of the piece. And a great way to test the integrity of the voice-parts: in general, a fairly sound effort – the odd, typically Poulenc, dissonant sonority needed careful attention, but otherwise an exciting start.

Victoria’s Ave Maria is another motet which has great rhythmic freedom – occasionally there’s a dance-feel that interrupts the regular metric feel, as though he is eager to dance but feels he can’t within the confines of a formal sacred motet, but it’s uncontrollable and sometimes can’t help but burst through. Unlock the dance-rhythm in music, and it comes alive…

Hail, Bright Cecilians!

And here are some of us: Reading Week and flu claimed the others.

Hail, Bright Cecilians!

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The Cecilian Choir drew its first breath this week, launching into its programme of repertoire for the year and beginning with Tallis and Lassus.

Lassus’ Adoramus te, Christe is a very strange little motet: it moves harmonically into places where, tonally, the ear is expecting something else, and voice-parts occasionally introduce flats that steer the harmony into unusual corners. All of which makes for challenging sight-reading, but to which the choir rose with aplomb.

Tallis’ popular If Ye Love Me offers the opportunity for the singers to relish consonants and vowel-shapes, particularly on the words ‘love’ and ‘commandments.’

The choir has grown in size since last year, and we’ve changed the rehearsal layout and the space we occupy in Eliot College Hall, which allows a greater resonance; there was a point in the rehearsal at which the choir finished the Tallis anthem, and the final chord of F major suddenly rose into the roof and filled the entire hall: and the intonation was perfect as well.

A great start to the year, with lots more repertoire to look forward to, plus a few seasonal surprises. Stay tuned…

Cantus Firmus: on song

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From the wealth of auditions over a two-day period, this year’s Chamber Choir has emerged, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the last. This year the Choir is larger than in previous years, so much so that we’ve had to change rehearsal venue from the Old Telephone Exchange to Grimond Lecture Theatre II.

The new team!

Over the first two rehearsals, we’ve begun exploring the repertoire for this year’s series of concert engagements, which has grown to include ‘Advent by Candlelight’ in St. Mildred’s Church in Canterbury in December, and a concert at St. Gregory’s, Wye – these alongside the customary performances in the University Carol Service at the end of term, and the Cathedral Crypt concert in February. A packed year indeed… (More details on our on-line events calendar here).

The theme for this year’s Crypt concert is music from England, Wales and Scotland, and in the first rehearsal we worked through motets by William Byrd and Sir John Tavener; for the Advent concert, we began singing some Advent antiphons from manuscripts dating from the four-stave notation system popular until the sixteenth century; this gives the choir the chance to read from historical notation and an added sense of the past to the music being sung. We also began working at a carol I’ve written for the December Carol Service, a setting of A Babe is Born, which employs open-fifth pedal chords to create a medieval atmosphere.

Also bursting back to life this term is the Cecilian Choir, formed from Scholars, students, staff and alumni. The Cecilian Choir was a new venture last year, and is back by popular demand: rehearsals begin next week, and we’ll be working towards a very exciting programme for performance in the Spring term, about which more will be revealed later…

It’s an exciting time: new musical students, new ensembles forming, and the beginning of this year’s musical journeys exploring old and new repertoire. As a conductor, first rehearsals are terrifying: will everyone turn up, will they get on with each other, will the balance of the voice-parts work, will they like the repertoire I’ve chosen, how quickly will they learn the music, and, perhaps most importantly – will they enjoy themselves and want to come back next week ?

You can follow the story of the choirs here, from first rehearsal to final performance; we’ll also be bringing you audio clips of the choirs in rehearsal and sneak previews of some of the pieces being performed this year. Stay tuned…

(And if you’ve a fond recollection or stories from your experience with the Chamber Choir in previous years, get in touch: we’ll be featuring them in a regular column here.)