Singocracy

(...or an off-facebook rant about the hypocrisy of the singing world.  Or, to be fairer to the mostly non-hypocritical singing world, a rant for the hypocritical singing circumstances under which I currently struggle.  Or something along those lines.)

I'm intrigued.  Did you really want to use twenty top-class singers in this way?

No, really, where on earth did you get the idea of bringing together twenty excellent singers from all over Europe, then barely ever let them sing over a mezzo-piano?  In fact in the whole of the two programmes (which include bombastic gems like Vivaldi's Gloria and Tavener's Svyati) you only let us sing forte twice.  TWICE. 

Silver-lining: I have finally found my falsetto register, something I never had as a soprano.  It's a shame that it may not last the week, though.  I am preparing a black armband as I type, and a short eulogy to the effects of new life lost too soon to the hypocrisies of the singing world.  Or something along those lines.

I understand, I do, that as a whole we make an extraordinary pianissimo.  So many people making such a tiny sound.  I hear it, (just, over my heart pounding with the strain of making long, l o n g  phrases with an extraordinary pianissimo) but hell's teeth, man, you're slaying our chords with quietness.  Too much of a good thing, and all that.

It appears that you want a single-voice sound from many people, but I wonder if you've ever thought how easy that would be, say, with one to a part?  Not that I like pointing out the obvious, but, really...

Now,  please don't get me wrong, it's actually rather exhilarating to be part of such mammoth quiet, but not, and may I be crystal clear here, not ALL THE TIME. 

Silver-lining: I'm not the only one who feels this, and have been surprised, yet at the same time not surprised, to hear from most of the female singers that this will be their last project.  They, too, are concerned about the damage constant pianissimo does to their voices.  I thought that perhaps my last (first) project with this ensemble was an anomaly (who really asks their singers to make such teeny-tiny noises for Mozart's Requiem or Mass in c minor) but it appears to be his 'thing', his calling-card, and party-piece all rolled into one.   I guess this also explains why so many of the old alto and soprano sections aren't taking part this time around...

Wait, I'm getting confused, that's schadenfreude, not a silver-lining.  Or something along those lines.

And don't forget that we haven't had our first rehearsal with the orchestra yet... after which I suspect all that time making pseudo-singing noises might just have been wasted.   Although, to be honest, he'll probably just make them play pianissimo, too.

Then we get to those singers who have stayed...  Yes, some of them have voices of amazing beauty, but... some of them don't.   And of the latter it appears, to me at least, that you don't want to scare them off...  The loud alto who constantly sings flat when she pushes her voice, (I forgot the cantus firmus in one of the contemporary pieces: loud and louder all the way through, although the rest are pianissimo-ing their way to the end) at which the rest of us try to tune up then get a mouthful for not being together, pitch-wise, with the louder lass.  And do you *really* like the way she back-chats you and tells everyone what they're doing wrong, or are you suffering in silence?  A bit like us...  And the tenor with the constant vibrato.  Baroque, classical,  or contemporary, it's there distorting harmony and, if nothing else, my sanity.  Yet for these, and other mistreatments of music, you say nothing, yet demand of the rest of us complete and utter homogeny of sound.  Which is effing hard when you've got a flat alto, a wobbly tenor, and other small but annoying anomolies of the perfect sound you want.  

Silver-lining: I should be able to pay my rent.  I suspect that statement makes me somewhat hypocritical, too. 

Or something along those lines.

ASC II

No, this isn't going to be a post about ancient forms of electronic art... 

It is going to be about Actual Singing Content, no less, the second post of that name!  Singing in this delightful, almost secret corner of Amsterdam, in fact:

engelse kerk (english church) begijnhof, amsterdam

The music was Ferrandini's 'Il Pianto di Maria' a quite astonishing cantata (which was attributed to Handel for many years) with a lovely group of baroque musicians from Leiden.  I'd been dying to get my chords around this piece since I heard it back in, oh, 1996 or 7.  Back in the days when people still thought it was written by Mr Handel.  I did sing it once about 8 years ago in Germany, but managed to compliment it with a horrendous cold, and just couldn't do it justice, so I was delighted to be able to suggest it as a piece to sing with the Leids Barok Ensemble for a weekend of concerts this Spring.  And extra bonus, I get to take it on tour to Portugal with them this coming Summer!  

Yes.  There will be photos.

But back to Amsterdam.  The English Reformed Church (although now officially of the Church of Scotland) can be found through a door off the street in Spui in the centre of Amsterdam.  I had no idea it was there until this weekend!  Through the door and down a wee passage and you come across a tiny haven of old Amsterdam.  The church is one of the oldest buildings in Amsterdam, and the enclosed courtyard has buildings that you associate with the porcelain and pottery Dutch-style houses you find in any and every souvenir shop here.

The inside was just as charming, and very Presbyterian!

But yes, as you can see, there was a stained glass window!  HUZZAH!  And although the other windows were of plain glass, I think the exterior views made them just as entrancing!

Another of the hidden gems of the church is what I presume was something of a sacristy from the times when the church was of the Catholic faith, before the reformation.  Even now it looks like somewhere just waiting for a lady in Dutch costume and perhaps holding a vase of flowers to come in and be painted by Vermeer, or one of his Amsterdamse contemporaries!

The second concert, in Leiden, was also in a church slightly hidden from normal view:

lokhorstkerk, pieterskerkstraat, leiden - with the white doorway
(the massive church in the background is the pieterskerk)

It looks a little like another posh-fronted building on an ancient street (one the buildings opposite had a build date of 1610:)

but was a little gem inside:

Ah, it was a lovely weekend of music-making!  The Ferrandini is one hell of a piece, and I highly recommend trying to listen to a recording.  There are so many heart-racing moments - the expressive recitatives, the plaint, repeated twice, the amazing second-to-last aria with 4 separate violin parts which give the most scrumptious dissonant harmonies... mmmmmmmmmmm.  That's what music's all about!

 

And the flowers weren't bad, either!

 

 

Beethoven's Wingspan

I thought I'd start the new year with an actual finished object!  Yes indeedy - I'm a-hurrying with the old knitting this year because... well, because I've joined a 13 items for 2013 type thingy on Ravelry.  A glutton for punishment, I hear you ask.  It appears so...

 wingspan by maylin tri'coterie designs
noro 'kureyon sock' no.236

I actually started this just before Christmas when I was doing my first Beethoven 9.  (Beethoven's Ninth 'Choral' Symphony for those not it the know - the last movement uses four soloists and a massive choir.  I can imagine it caused a bit of a ruckus at the very first concert!)  Needless to say, I wasn't embarking on this new project while I was on stage of course (although having to sit through the first three movements...  the distraction would have been welcome!  I'm not a fan of sitting on stage with nothing to do except try not to attract the attention of the audience, especially as we soloists weren't hiding beside the choir at the back, but were placed off to the side in full view of the watching public!)  But I hope this at least explains the title of this post.  I'm pretty sure good ol' Ludwig wasn't of the feathery-armed persuasion.

Wingspan is really a shawl, and I first saw the pattern at the end of 2011 I think, and just fell head-over-heels with some of the projects on the pattern page.  It did take me a while to get round to it, but on deciding to make it using the DK pattern but with fingering-weight yarn to make more scarf-like in appearance, it turned out to be excellent time-before-concerts/tv-watching finger-fodder!  I snaffled another person's idea to add the eyelets and I'm glad I did as they add some really nice pinpricks of light over an otherwise muted scarf.  (The photo above is about as close to the actual colours as my camera would allow - in real life it's all really rather green, but the rest of the photos are rather orange-centric, which I (as a non-orange-loving person) would never use!  Do feel free to click on the photos to embiggen!

Not a bad start to the year, methinks!  It's a great (free) pattern that doesn't ask for much brain power or concentration, but still gives a great end result!  Just how I like it! ;-)

 

Possibly The Best Music In The World

Well, there had to be some kind of reference to Carlsberg advertising, considering we were in Copenhagen. ('Carlsberg, possibly the best lager in the world'...)

But what brought me to wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen?  Brahms. Brahms and a smidgeon of Schubert.  And a (non music-) student orchestra that didn't play like (non music-) students, thanks to their excellent conductor, a very dear friend of mine.

Brahms with a mix of Sir Malcolm Sargent, I should say, as I got to sing Brahms in a wonderful new version (for mezzo-soprano) of Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), originally written for voice and piano, in a wonderful full orchestration by the afore-mentioned Sargent.  So very lush and multi-dimensional!  

The smidgeon of Schubert was Berlioz's orchestration of Die Erlkönig.  I have a beautiful cd of Ann Sofie von Otter singing some of these orchestrations, and I was thrilled to find out the encore would be one of these glorious arrangements!  Needless to say, I found all five songs so very different to sing with orchestra than with piano.  Of course, you can still be intimate when singing with an orchestra, but I find it's such a different kind of intimacy.  Piano and voice is quite stark in many ways, but is also very present.  Just two people and their instruments creating expression and colour and their own little world.  The palette is much more full with an orchestra, and it is always fun (and challenging) to try and create equally vibrant tones with the voice.  (I suspect you can tell I've had more experience singing with orchestras and ensembles than with just piano!)  But, needless to say, any given piece, on any given day, with any given singer, using any given accompaniment will create a myriad of different performances.  It is, after all, what live music (to me) is all about.

Copenhagen is full to the gunwales with strangely out-of-place architecture.  Their city hall (Københavns Rådhus, pictured above) looks like a northern European version of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, slightly clunkier and not having quite the right glowing red brick.  And the inside is even stranger - walls, ceilings staircases all in 15th century style covered in tiles and trompe l'oeil of the early 20th century Art Deco period.  

And if that wasn't enough, there was the rather splendid World Clock - an astronomical clock designed by Jens Olsen at the beginning of last century.

But, as much as it would have been wonderful, wonderful, Copenhagen itself was not one of the places we were performing. 

There was intimacy of a different kind when we did our first concert, not in Denmark, but in Germany.  (I would have mentioned this before, but it didn't go with the title of the post!)  The lovely town of Münster played host to our fair company for a few days, and (apart from hellishly sleepless nights due to noisy incumbents of the same hotel) it was an interesting visit.  

The town itself is lovely - the centre looks very old indeed and is surrounded by wonderful churches, but in reality 90% of the old town was destroyed in WWII.  The old city has been rebuilt to look the way it did pre-war, and it is very charming, although slightly melancholy when you think of how old the buildings were before they were bombed.

We didn't, sadly, get to sing in any of these wonderful buildings, but instead were given the great lecture theatre of the university.  Complete with the acoustics of a taxidermied donkey.  The dusty and air-conditioned (and, strangely, central-heated) stuffy air of both backstage and front of house gave the impression that you were singing and breathing into an ancient velvet curtain, letting no sound resonate but instead smother it to death in a surprisingly efficient manner.  This is the kind of intimate sound all performers can do quite happily without...

But back to Denmark, where we had acoustics in cathedral-loads. 

Århus Domkirke was very generous with its sound.  Perhaps a bit too generous, but after Münster anything was delightful!  (And there was the added bonus of seeing the exterior of the rather amazing-looking theatre - found at the bottom of these five photos.)  I shall always remember Århus, however, not for being a pretty town with lovely architectural features, but for supplying me with possibly the finest cappuccino I think I've ever had.

Finally we arrived at the Messiaskirken in Charlottenlund, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, but do I have photographic evidence of this? No, because I caught a stomach bug and spent most of the time I wasn't singing, hovering around the only loo...  (And let it be noted that it was due to very greasy pizza, and not copious amounts of Carlsberg!) But Mister Google is, as always, most helpful...

I have to say that although it was quite small, it was, in comparison to the other places, happily oh-so-acoustically perfect!  And like the ending in all traditional fairy tales, the last of the three was the 'just-right' setting in the story of Goldi-Redlocks and the Three Venues.  

Possibly the worst pizza in the world, though...

ASC

aka Actual Singing Content.

basilique sainte marie-madeleine de vézelay

Or choral content to be precise.

But don't anyone ever tell you it's easier than solo work. Because it's not. Nope. Nuh-uh. Not in a million years.  You need an extra kind of confidence. It's not enough to know you can sing the music by yourself, you need to know that you can sing it with other people, be able to blend with other voices, not be put off by the others in your section, or be so scared that you're not pulling your weight, or are sounding crap, that you end up forgetting how your technique works. You almost need to be arrogant about it all.  It intrigues and confounds me!

But what better music to be intrigued and confounded by than the wonders that are the Requiem, and Mass in c minor, by WA Mozart, with Arsys Bourgogne, and the Camerata Salzburg.  Om nom nom!  (I auditioned last year - my first as mezzo/alto, so I was doubly pleased to take part!)

But enough of such inane twaddle - I know you really want to know about where we sang, not why, what, or how we sang!  ('Cos really, after the initial - ooh pretty music, and ooh - cool orchestra, the rest is all hard work, sweat, and tears!)

Arriving at Vézelay in Burgundy in 36c heat at 9pm wasn't my idea of fun, I have to admit, but after making a tour of the village, fell in love.  Not with the hills. No. (The small town is built on the summit of a hill.  The rehearsal venue and the basilica was at the top, my hotel was at the bottom.  Big hill.  Much sweat.)  But oh. Pretty. PRETTY!

Ruins.

Ancient buildings.

Picture-postcard views.

And then there was the Romanesque Basilica of Saint Mary Magdalene.

Absolutely stuffed to the gunwhales (or, should I say up to the pillars) with fabulous stone carving...

 feel free to click on the pictures for enlargments

The interior is lovely and light, with some nice stone striping on the arches.

And there was one example of stained glass.  (I had taken many more of the same window, but only discovered once I had arrived home that the reason none really came out was because the lens was rather needing cleaned!)

An exhausting 10 days, but totally worth it to be able to marvel over a lovely and ancient small town, and take part in some fabulous music-making.