Arts versus Sports

It's annoyed me for years that the Arts in our newspapers get such short shrift compared to Sport. Oh, yes, we have two pages (on the same day, Thursday) each week, given over to the Arts. But wait, Sport not only gets a minimum of three or four pages per day, but a complete and separate section of its own on a Friday. 

Reviews of concerts and theatre events each get a minimum number of words (300) and even some of those may be cut at the sub-editor's discretion, if they get a review at all. And sometimes the reviews are so late that they're no use to someone making up their mind whether to go to a show or not. The Taieri Musical Theatre production of Grease which took place last week from Thursday to Saturday, with four performance in all, got a review, but it didn't appear until Monday this week, after the show had closed. This isn't unusual. 

So I was immensely pleased to see someone else commenting on this issue in today's paper. 

Letter to the Editor in the Otago Daily Times, 28.7.16, page 20.

The ODT (7.7.16) reported in just 87 words the outstanding clean sweep by the New Zealand Youth choir at a recent international competition in Pardubice, Czech Republic. The choir won all four categories and the Grand Prix.

Imagine if this [had] been given an All Blacks’ victory treatment. Front page, with a picture, it would have included: every piece of music the choirs sang, how many points were awarded in each category, the judges’ comments, which choir members had sore throats or mild colds, biographical details of “new caps” in the choir and performance statistics for those who had been in the choir before, comments on their training and preparation, and reactions to the win from singing teachers and choral experts. The conductor would be a household name.

Dreaming, I know, as apparently we are far more interested in reading 500 words on the naming of the Russian Olympic athletic team.

Rosemary McBryde, 

Waitati. 

More lasting than themselves

I'm writing notes for a programme for the ladies' choir I conduct. Something that strikes me over and over again is how often a published but extremely minor poet, a poet who is now all but forgotten (except perhaps on Wikipedia), has managed to survive longer into the future than might otherwise have been the case, because one or two of his or her poems were set to music. By a much more famous composer.

The songs I'm thinking of are mostly from the British art song period - from the very late 19th century into the first few decades of the 20th, but the same thing applies to much German lieder. The composers are remembered, and there's information about them online - often at length. But the poets are almost entirely forgotten, in spite of having produced reams of poetry, or twenty or thirty novels, or various other writings in their lifetime. And even if the poets are still visible online, their work is forgotten: a mere list of names of books that few libraries would have copies of.

Billy Collins wrote a delightful poem called Marginalia, about the sorts of things that people scribble in the margins of books. In one stanza he writes:

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoriajotted along the borders of the Gospelsbrief asides about the pains of copying,a bird singing near their window,or the sunlight that illuminated the page -anonymous men hitching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. 

Those last two lines are apt for what I've written above: like those Irish monks, the names of the poets would be forgotten if it wasn't for the vessel, the composer (or perhaps the song), being more lasting than themselves. 

A few random thoughts of Mahler's music

I finished reading Norman Lebrecht's 2010 book, Why Mahler: how one man and ten symphonies changed the world yesterday, and have done a rather hastily-written review here, so I'm not going to repeat what I said.

I just wanted to make a few notes about my experience of Mahler over a long period of time, which admittedly has been entirely through recordings. I've never actually had the opportunity, as far as I recall, of seeing his work performed live.

The first time I heard anything by Mahler was when I bought a record of his Fourth Symphony through a record club I belonged to, back in the late fifties/early sixties. They'd post out their record of the month, and you could either keep it (and pay for it) or send it back and get something else, or just get nothing. Anyway, the symphony started with sleighbells. Odd. And then in the fourth movement a woman began singing, sweeping along with the orchestra at a great pace - Leonard Bernstein was the conductor.

Singing in a symphony? Well of course I was young and naive, and didn't know that having singers in a symphony was hardly new - Beethoven had done it way back in the Ninth, though I probably wasn't aware of that then, being only a callow teenager. (I was ignorant enough to have been astounded to hear from another piano player that Shostakovich was not only still alive but still writing symphonies.)

But Beethoven's Ode to Joy in the Ninth (a jolly little folk song he commandeered which drives me mad wherever I hear it) was nothing compared to the joyous and delightful singing in the Mahler. Mahler's own songs often made their way into his symphonies in some form or other, and if you know the songs you'll recognise them in the symphonies; or vice versa. He's a very self-referential composer, which makes you think, when you hear one of his symphonies for the first time, that you've heard bits of it before. You probably have. He seems to use ideas from one symphony to the next, and certainly his style is so peculiar to him that on hearing a piece of music you can often identify it as being his: there are phrases, mannerisms, ways of orchestrating things that appear again and again.

This is hardly unusual: many composers' "voices" are surprisingly unique, in spite of the fact that they're working with the same bunch of notes. Mozart is recognisable almost invariably, so too Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and dozens of others.

But Mahler is a little different. I remember Chesterton (I think it was) saying that the books of Charles Dickens were like chunks cut from one long cloth. They were full of Dickensian stuff; and even where he plans out his books more carefully, it's unfailingly Dickens. Mahler, to me, seems the same. It's as if he had one enormous symphony inside him and just chopped off an hour or so at a time for the next one.

That's a simplification, of course. As is the comment about Dickens. And yet both have an element of truth in them.

I was a bit surprised the other day to find that I had five of Mahler's symphonies on CD. Which means that I've listened to a lot more of his music than I'd thought (apart from what I've heard on the radio over many years). I don't have the Symphony of a Thousand (it's number 8), so watched this on You Tube yesterday. The wonderfully enthusiastic Gustavo Dudamel conducts a combined - and enormous - orchestra made up of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. Four different choirs are involved, massed up and up beyond the orchestra on stands. (The youngest choir sings without music, and occasionally you see one of them turn to another and maybe tell them they've sung something wrong, or else one spies the camera and gives a grin.)  Apparently there are 1400 people involved. Crikey. There are seven soloists as well.

Mahler seems to have delighted in going for the extreme. In at least one other of his symphonies (no 2, the Resurrection) he lists out the instrumentation required, then adds, as the score progresses, twice as many of this and six more of those, as though musicians would suddenly appear out of the woodwork during the course of the performance. I'd love to see it happen, but it's probably not going to.

I don't know whether Mahler's Symphonies changed the world. Certainly hearing the 4th for the first time was a delightful surprise, but did it change my world? Possibly, but not in a way that made me turn direction. I still get a lump in my throat at hearing the singing beginning her song in it, but then music of all sorts does that. Listening to Mahler's 2nd Symphony the other day, which also has a large choir and soloists, I got all emotional when the choir came in, super-super softly, and just sang about the life after death, about being raised from the dead. Does it change my world? Well, I don't know, but it certainly adds to it.

Choristers' Concert

In just under two weeks' time, the ladies choir that I conduct - the Choristers - will have their annual concert.  I've been working with this group for most of this year, and it's been really enjoyable. I'm not the world's greatest conductor, and probably don't have a sufficiently good ear to be a really good choral conductor, but we manage, and the ladies are very forgiving...!

I took over at rather short notice from someone who'd originally come in just to fill in for the proper conductor, and who obviously then stayed quite a long time...  That's the sort of thing that can happen; the real holder of the job goes on temporary sick leave, and then doesn't get well, and the relief person winds up basically taking over.  So I've now taken over from the relief conductor - to her relief.

We've performed at several rest homes and groups this year, and will do even more of this next year. Because it took a little while for me as a new conductor to get up to speed, we didn't go out to places much early in the year, but since June we've been out and about a good deal.

The Choristers were originally the YMCA Choir - not being very much up with the history of the group I can't tell you when they changed their name, but I think it's some time ago.  I'll have to check.  Many of those who were in the YMCA Choir have now retired, due to old age, but old age hasn't stopped others.  Our group ranges in age from the late sixties to the late eighties. Nevertheless, we welcome women of all ages.  Because we practise in the daytime, all those in the choir are retired, with perhaps one or two exceptions.

The ladies are delightful, and it's been a pleasure working with them. They're looking forward to the concert on the 17th November, when they'll be including some recently-learnt songs in the programme, as well as old favourites.  The concert will be held at the Mornington Presbyterian Community Hall, in Maryhill Terrace. It starts at 2.00 pm. Cost is $10 a ticket, and of course there'll be door sales if you haven't booked in advance.

Verdi Requiem...live!

Thank you, Signor Verdi, for writing the world’s most operatic Requiem.  Thank you for the wondrous moments when tears come to the eyes at the sheer beauty of what you wrote, or when the heart surges at those fearsome fortissimos where all four soloists are singing their lungs out and the chorus is blasting us with primitive passion and the orchestra is doing huge runs and enormous crashes.  Or when everything suddenly hushes and a breeze passes by, or a bird, and the mezzo or the soprano appears from nowhere with another of your endless series of melodies. What a gift this piece of music is. (And how marvellously strange is the sound of the soprano and mezzo singing an octave apart - it ought to be the most simple thing in the world, yet it's just magic.)

In this work Verdi, freed from the constraints of the stage – peasant, gypsy or courtier choruses, duets between lovers, maleficent basses and scary contraltos – is able to indulge in the luxury of just writing wondrous music as and how he pleases.  Yes, of course he has the wonderfully dramatic lines of the Requiem Mass holding it all together, but he isn’t affected by the mechanics of getting people on and off the stage, and all the other typical trappings of a 19^th century opera.  And he’s working with a script that has more depth, perhaps, than any other libretto he used in his career.

You can see how this piece came into existence on Wikipedia.   More important is its effect on an audience, and tonight at the Dunedin Town Hall I heard it live for the first time ever.  I’ve known the work since I bought an LP of it back when I was a teenager, and I’ve loved it ever since.  The conductor was Pietari Inkinen, the 33-year-old Finnish conductor who’s presently the music director of the NZSO.  He looks a bit like a schoolboy, but he had no problem commanding the forces: a large orchestra, four soloists and a massive (very much expanded) Dunedin City Choir.   Lisa Harper-Brown was for me the highlight of the evening.  That’s not to say the other soloists were unequal to the task, but this soprano has a superb command of her vocal instrument and a massive sound.  Several times she held solidly onto her music stand as though the sheer power of what she was doing might blow her away.  But she was equally capable of producing a wondrous soft sound that still managed to hit the back of the hall.  She was just fabulous.

 

Soprano Margaret Medlyn took the mezzo/contralto part.  It requires a wide range (as does the proper soprano part) and in her upper register, Medlyn was terrific.  Sometimes the lower notes seemed to get overwhelmed, but it may have been where I was sitting in the audience.  I suspect that being off to one side meant that some of the sound went by me.  Rosario La Spina was the tenor.  He’s Australian by birth, of Sicilian descent, and a former bricklayer.  He has a big solid tenor voice, somehow ‘thick’ in its colour.  Someone else tonight described him as a Helden tenor, but I don’t think that’s quite what he is.  Anyway, he rang his voice around the Town Hall with ease. Jud Arthur was the bass, and what a great sound he has.  His part in the Requiem is reminiscent of many of Verdi’s dark bass characters, and Arthur brought that great dark sound to his singing.  

What wonderful things Verdi does with the chorus - sorry, choir.  They're things that he could never have achieved on stage: eerie whispering sounds, the edginess of hearing well over a hundred people all singing softly at once, joyful counterpoint, massive harmonic stretches and utter excitement.  This aspect of the piece was terrific. 

The orchestra has plenty to do, though I don't think it's ever stretched.  Much of what they play is similar to music Verdi provides for his opera orchestras; it's just on a bigger scale.   And yet his simple tricks (they're things he does throughout his operas, particularly the ones in the first half of his career) - the little echoes from wind instruments, the shrieking piccolo in the climaxes, the bass note on the beat from cellos and basses answered by a chord from the upper strings: this last could be so banal, and yet in the one particular moment when I became aware of it I thought how wonderfully evocative it was at that point.  And of course there's the great brass fanfares early in the piece, reminiscent of Aida.  Only very late in his career did Verdi start doing really interesting things with his orchestra - The Merry Wives of Windsor is quite unlike early Verdi.  He was never a great colourist, and you sometimes feel he relied on the well-tested tricks that Italian opera composers had been doing for a long time (and many of those techniques were based on Italian popular songs).  For all that, what he does in the Requiem always hits the spot, and every so often there are moments that a spine-tingling: that hectic rush up and down that the orchestra does at one point - it only happens once, I think - lifts you out of your seat.  

Did I enjoy finally hearing the Requiem in a live performance?  You bet I did!

A movie and a book

Having heard good reports about A Song for Marion (also known as Unfinished Song) I was surprised at how disappointed I was.  It's mostly about Terence Stamp, a grumpy old man who seems to have no good reason to be so grumpy.  The script never actually gives him a reason, so Stamp is forced to  be grumpy just because he is. Vanessa Redgrave plays his wife who loves him dearly (he seems to love her greatly too); she dies fairly early on from a cancer that's returned after remission. Gemma Arterton plays the young schoolteacher who takes a community choir that Redgrave enjoys going to, and Christopher Ecclestone plays Stamp's son; at one point he asks the obvious questions as to why his father is so grumpy, but since Stamp isn't given any reason in the script he doesn't get a response (!)

The movie swings between delineating the realities of old age, and patronising old people: why is it filmmakers think old people want to do heavy metal songs or songs where sex appears in every line?  The two best songs in the movie (one sung by Redgrave and one by Stamp) are both much more worthy of inclusion than the rubbish ones the choir is supposedly learning.  Stamp and Ecclestone bring reality to their characters (it's a pity the mending of their relationship takes place off-screen) and Redgrave is good in the short amount of screen time she gets. The rest of the cast (including Arterton) seem to have forgotten that when your face is blown up on a cinema screen there's no need to gawk and gawp and overdo every reaction.  I lost count of the number of times people reacted in an actorish way (rather like people in bit parts in the worst kind of amateur theatre); presumably the director thought this was good.  Or else the movie was made for television primarily, where such reactions aren't so overblown.

I'd been told it was a film needing a box of tissues.  Nope, it isn't.  In contrast, I finished Chaim Potok's massive novel, In the Beginning, last night.  The end of this book definitely requires a couple of tissues (well, a handkerchief in my case, since I still use those now-seemingly-despised objects).  Potok seems to take a long time to get to the end; some judicious cutting would have helped, I think, but he weaves and connects themes and images constantly throughout the story, and perhaps without the space to do so the book wouldn't have been so effective. 

It's a pretty gloomy piece: the Jewish narrator, Daniel, is injured in a fall as a baby and damages something in his nasal area, meaning that he is prone to illnesses throughout his childhood.  The operation to cure this only happens in the last fifty pages of the 450 page novel.  His father was once a soldier fighting against the Polish Cossacks, back in his home country of Poland, and he has formed a group to bring his Jewish friends and their families to America, which is supposedly a land where Jews are treated better.  He has been greatly successful in this, and works as a real estate agent in the US.  There's a great sense of Jewish community and fellowship throughout the book, as well as the huge strength of family.  However, Daniel's grandparents on his mother's side are still in Poland, along with a number of other relations.  They dither and shilly-shally about coming to the US until it is too late.  Hitler comes to power, and the Nazi concentration camps come into existence.

We discover that Daniel's mother had been married before, to her current husband's brother. Confusingly he was also called Daniel, and Potok plays with this confusion a number of times in the book.  Daniel was killed by the Cossacks, and in proper Jewish tradition, Max takes his brother's wife as his own.  It wasn't that he had to; he could have put the tradition aside.  But there is obviously great love between Daniel's parents; it's never considered to be a marriage of convenience. The older Daniel was set to be a great scholar, and the younger Daniel inherits his uncle's brains. This turns out not to be such a good thing; he is bullied often in school, and despised for knowing more than those who have to work hard to study. And as he comes into manhood, he makes a decision to study outside the world of Judaism, in order to understand the Torah in a much deeper sense. We don't know whether he truly believes that the Torah is God's word (his younger brother tells him, eventually, that he doesn't, but he keeps up the traditions all the same); rather he is concerned for the argument, the jot and tittle of debate, the disagreements between ancient Jewish scholars, the reading between the lines, the working out why the Torah appears to contradict itself and much more. We read about a good deal of this during the book. Daniel soaks up all this kind of information as he grows, reading deep into the night, and causing those around him bewilderment.

The book almost seems like a biography, though one told in fictional terms. There is no plot as such, and yet in the last pages of the book, what we have learned over many pages about Daniel and his extended family causes us to be deeply affected as we read the last few events. The book is full of vivid characters, of wisdom and a deep understanding of people, particularly Jewish people. The book is soaked in the traditions and teaching of the Jewish people, and in their longstanding complaint against God and the world as to why they are treated so badly. There are no answers to this question - different characters offer different views on it, on why it should be so, and what can be done about it.  None of these things actually alter the suffering of this people.

Reading this book is like going on a long journey: there are varied discoveries, there are people you meet and get to know for a time who then vanish completely, there is a sense of humanity and warmth, and of travelling immense distances from one event to another.  Though there were times, as I've noted above, when it seemed a drawn-out journey, at the end it proved to have been worth the effort. 

Southern Concert of Voices concert

Yesterday my wife and I went to the Southern Consort of Voices' Concert in the former Dominican Nuns' chapel behind St Joseph's Cathedral.  This is a lovely venue, and one that's unfamiliar to most people in Dunedin, I suspect.  Certainly I've never been there before, though admittedly when I was younger the building would have been off-limits to most people, particularly males.  It was part of the large Dominican convent complex, and the only other time I remember being in the complex was when we performed a play in the Hall. How that came about I can't remember, but I think it was quite a daunting place for the audience to find!  (The play was An Inspector Calls, the first play produced by the Marlowe Players, a group long since disbanded.)

The Dominicans have long since moved on from this complex, and it's now cared for by the Diocese as a whole, I assume.  I imagine the building gets a certain amount of use by the local parish these days.

The choir was somewhat bigger than the last time I saw them, at least as far as the women were concerned, and was in very good voice.  Their programme was focused around Otago composers (with a couple of ring-ins who only just made it because of some connection with the area) and was an interesting mix.  Four of the eight composers were in the audience: Corwin Newall, Alan Edwards, Alex Campbell-Hunt and Anthony Ritchie.  Newall is a current music student at Otago, and Campbell-Hunt has just completed a Mus B there.)

Newall's piece was a setting of the Ave Maria and was quite an ambitious piece for the choir to open with, but they did it well and it communicated itself to the audience.  This was followed by two pieces  composed by Richard Madden, both of them familiar: Bullulalow and I Sing of a Maiden.  Madden has a lovely expressive gift and the second of these two pieces has one of the sweetest tunes around.

Leanne Veitch's Sing Christmas is a boisterous piece that leaves the choir gasping for breath at the end - effective, but not something you'd want to sing twice in a row.  Alan Edwards' I will sing to the Lord was short and didn't make a particular impact on me on first hearing.  I suspect it's a piece you need to become familiar with to enjoy thoroughly.

The final piece in the first half (all the pieces here had some religious link) was The Lord Bless You and Keep You.  It was composed by Michael Winikoff in memory of his father - Winikoff is a regular member of the choir but was overseas yesterday.  The words of the blessing are ones that Winikoff's father would use to his family and they are sung in both English and Hebrew during the course of the piece.  There's also a violin obbligato.   The piece has a lovely, slightly unusual setting of the English words, and then gradually introduces the Hebrew.  Finally the two are sung together forming a rich and evocative sound.   This piece went down well with the audience. 


In the second half we had three settings of poems by Emily Dickinson, composed by Christopher Marshall.  To Hear the Oriole Sing was lovely, I'm Nobody a delight and the piece that the audience responded most quickly to; Hope is the Thing with Feathers was less engaging on first hearing.  One difficulty with choral works is that the words can easily be lost in the mix of harmonies and counterpoints.  A couple of pieces suffered a little from this, particularly the third of the Marshall songs.  Without the words, the music can lose its point to a degree.  As a listener you resign yourself to not being able to tell what's being sung, but this isn't ideal.  Naturally it requires a great deal of effort on the choir's part to communicate the words distinctly, and often with the complexity of the music taking up much of their attention, this gets put in second place.  Anthony Ritchie's piece, Piano Practice, which came later in the concert, began with clear words.  These became more obscured, however, as time went on, and the point of the poem got lost - for me. 


Alex Campbell-Hunt's piece, Late Wisdom, is another that probably requires two or three hearings to get the feel at home with.  Not that it was particularly complex; it just didn't pick up the ears quite so readily on first hearing. 


Anthony Ritchie's three pieces were last on the programme.  In the Summer Fields has a Hungarian 

Bodhrán 

flavour to it, and came across well.  As I said Piano Practice missed out in terms of words, but is a lovely piece otherwise.   Song of Hope was another of those pieces that require some familiarity.   There's nothing that can be done about this in the process of a single concert!  


This was a pretty ambitious concert overall, with the singers being required to sing complex parts and pitch some difficult leaps - some also had to whistle, play bells and a bodhrán.   There were many beautiful moments when chords hung wonderfully in the air and on the ear, and when harmonies shifted magically.  

The ODT Big Night In

The Otago Daily Times' Big Night In concert took place last night in the Forsyth Barr Stadium here in Dunedin.   It must have cost the ODT an arm and a leg - several legs, in fact - and they certainly didn't stint on the costs.  In fact they're talking of having one every year.

It had a great cast of NZ national and local singers: big names, and up-and-coming names.   And a huge crowd turned out, with many seats filled, and the playing area in the centre packed with families.   Kids had a ball: they were free to come and go in safety, and danced and ran and jumped and did all sorts of other normal kid things.

We had seats in the West stand, directly opposite the stage, which meant that any performers on the stage looked like ants, some in white suits (the ensemble of singers) and some in black suits (the male singers) and some in various coloured clothes (the female singers and dancers).   I can't believe how far away the stage seemed to be.  Pity those up in the very top of either the West stand or the South stand.  They would have felt miles away from anything. 

Fortunately there was a large screen above the stage area which showed things in relative close-up.   We got a reasonable idea of what was going on on stage from this.

However, we had a much worse idea of what was being sung - or even spoken.   For some reason the amplication in the stadium just didn't cut it.  It was loud certainly, but it was blurred, somehow.   Unless you knew the song being sung, it was hard to figure out any words, and regrettably, all the marvellous orchestrations (we knew they were marvellous because we could see that aspect on the screen) went by the board because there was so little detail coming across in the sound system.   It was a bit like being partially deaf: everything kind of rolled into one blodge.   I know there were lots of high notes, because obviously all the singers felt this was the only they'd really get across to the audience in a place of this size, but other notes just dribbled away. 

It didn't help, of course, that people in the audience treated the whole concert side of things as an occasion to talk happily to their neighbours, or to point out people they knew, or a host of other things.  The buzz from the audience was continual, and none of the performers got complete quiet from the crowd.   I guess this isn't surprising in this kind of a setting, and perhaps the performers didn't expect anything else, but for me they eventually became a kind of wallpaper to the whole affair. 

Two young singers came on early in the programme: Sequoia Cunningham and Kawiti Watford.   I've heard the latter in the Town Hall and he filled the place easily.   Here he sang Figaro's aria from The Marriage of Figaro.   It sounded as though he knew what he was doing, but there was little clarity because of the sound system.  Terence Dennis, who was obviously playing his heart out on the piano - because we could see his fingers zipping around the keys - could only be heard when Watford wasn't singing.

Sequoia Cunningham sounded great, but her accompanist on the piano was almost inaudible too.  However, she has a big future ahead of her - that I could tell from her singing of Schubert's Ave Maria.

There were all sorts of other artists: a friend of mine on trombone in the orchestra (and some other familiar Dunedin faces there too); a bunch of dancers who did a lot of rolling around on the floor, but seldom got completely in to the picture on the screen; an ensemble of singers (with another friend of mine in it); bagpipers, Highland dancers, the Glee group (with the daughter of friends in it), the children's choir (with two kids I know in it) the Mayor and the Publishers of the ODT and Malcolm Farry, who worked hard to get the Stadium off the ground.  Lots of talent.  What a pity it just all seemed so far away and blurry....

Big Sing

After seeing a tweet late yesterday afternoon saying: Concert tonight glenroy auditorium Dunedin. Best harmony singing around. Raising money for chch. 7.30 pm $10 entry - it was from mackersline, the username of one of the ODT writers - and then getting further confirmation (when I struggled to find it online) saying; Barbershop choruses from dunedin and chch women from Dunedin and two other Dunedin chorus, we decided to go and check it out, $10 a head being a reasonable price for us pensioners! (Just have to stick that in.)

When I did find it online, I noticed that Sunny Side Up were also performing, and that made the effort of getting out well worthwhile. We're good friends with some of the people in this group, but that's not the only reason we like to hear them sing. They bring a vibrancy to their singing that's different to anything else around (in Dunedin), and last night was no exception.


Their items came in the middle of the programme. They're not a slick group in the sense of choreographing their items, though they don't exactly stand still either, but they have some excellent singers (at least three of whom are people we know) and they perform songs that are out of the ordinary rather than old favourites from yesteryear; they pick up material that has its roots in Negro spirituals, or comes out of the folk streams of different countries (often including American folk). Last night they also sang Hey Jude with a strong solo from Bill, and Up above my head with an absolutely superb solo from Karen. Bill and Karen are also part of a singing quartet we've heard on several occasions: in fact they've more than once sung at gatherings such as birthdays we've attended, or put on ourselves (where they've happened to be part of the guest list).

Sunny Side Up was also the most 'diverse' group of the evening: one of the singers was in a wheel chair; they had an Indian woman playing drums a couple of times, and the people come from a wide range of backgrounds. This diversity was emphasized perhaps by their scarves, the only item they had in common (this group doesn't wear any sort of uniform) - these ranged over the whole colour spectrum.

Anyway, you can see I (we) like this group!

But we also liked the other groups too, and the range of singing talent in Dunedin was shown again and again. Some groups are stronger than others, which is only to be expected; nevertheless there was no group about which it could be said that they lacked the necessary skills to perform.

The evening opened with the Highland Harmony men's group. These guys tend to sing barbershop style songs arranged for choir, and I enjoyed them a lot - they also had the advantage of being on first. There's something soul-stirring about the sound of men singing in harmony. One of my favourite movie moments comes in Crimson Tide (or it might be The Hunt for Red October), where, as the sailors stand out in the pouring rain waiting to go on board their submarine, the sound track is filled with a choir of men singing the old hymn, For those in peril on the deep. If the film consisted of nothing else, it would be worth watching (listening to, perhaps).

A women's group, Distinctive Sounz, followed. Again they did their items well, but they seemed to have more altos and sopranos, and this somewhat limited the range of what they could sing.

Sunnyside Up came next and was followed by the Canterbury Plainsmen, a very experienced men's group from Christchurch. (Something else that's noticeable about these groups: the age range is often huge - this ChCh group had at least one teenager, and several guys who would have been well into their sixties, if not older.) The Plainsmen were excellent, but their style is very much national competition, which I suspect is based on an American approach to these kinds of barbershop choirs: the leader up the front doesn't just conduct the choir, he (or she in the case of the Dunedin Harmony Chorus, who followed next) is a bit of an actor too - very much so in the case of the Plainsmen. This is something that either suits your taste or doesn't; I'm not sure that either of us were enthused about the leader of the Plainsmen's approach, but it was a kind of integrated choreography which certainly gives some visual interest to the proceedings.

This choir has its own 'Unnamed Quartet' - the leader (singing as second tenor?) was part of this along with a guy from the choir who did a kind of falsetto solo version of Bring him home (from Les Mis) at one other point, and a young bass and baritone. Very stylish, though each of them was better as part of the group than when singing briefly as soloists.

There was also a female quartet called Nota Bene. Nice title. They're part of the Dunedin Harmony Chorus (formerly the Sweet Adelines, if my understanding is correct). This is an award-winning choir too, and you can see why. They're lively, the choir's full of good singers, and they work superbly together. (We also know one of the choir members well, but don't let that make you think I'm biased here!)

Nota Bene did a couple of items, substituting one about chocolate for one of the advertised pieces, because the latter was being sung elsewhere in the evening. We really enjoyed their items: the words were clear and snappy, the harmonies secure, and the niftiness of their vocal movement with each other was top notch. (That's another factor about this concert: clarity of words was a plus; so often I hear choirs from the classical stream who sing beautifully but don't seem to have any concern for the words.)


The same applied when the full choir came on. This is a choir that deserves the awards it's received. Plus their sparkly uniform was just great...!

Finally the Plainsmen got together with the Highland Harmony guys for a big sing of some old favourites. As always they did very well, but I think by that time of the evening I'd had my fill, and I needed to get up and stretch - we could have done with an interval: two hours plus was just a bit long to be sitting on seats that aren't the softest.

Virtual Voices

One of my colleagues at work used to sing in one of the big Wellington choirs, and has always enjoyed big choirs and the sound they make.  He says he 'has a love affair with the human voice.'   He's in hospital just now but when he comes out I'm going to alert him to Eric Whitacre's virtual choir.   I know I'm slow in catching up on this, and the only reason I came across it was because the Concert programme's competition this week has a prize of one of Whitacre's CDs, and they mentioned it in passing.

Here's Whitacre conducting his virtual, but definitely live, choir: 185 voices from 12 countries all apparently singing together.  I'm not sure how this is done, because the intro talks about '243 tracks' as well - does that mean he actually conducted each singer separately?   Seems unlikely.   But then, so does getting 185 internet connections to function perfectly together!  [You can actually see how it was put together in the link under Whitacre's name above...]

Praise the Lord!

When I worked in the bookshop I used to get a regular ezine from Bob Burroughs on music for church worship - and quite a bit more. We corresponded occasionally, and at one point he sent me a copy of each of the CDs he'd produced with the Florida Baptist Singing Men and Women. I used to play them often in the shop. The choir(s) are rich in sound, and have a superb ability to be strong or soft when needed. (That might sound obvious, but not every choir can do it - and this choir is all the more extraordinary in that it consists of volunteers from cities all over Florida.).

Backing the choir is a great band, with excellent brass in particular. The CD I've been listening to again recently is simply called Praise the Lord!

I like a lot of the tracks, but there's one that always amazes me. In it, for a few brief phrases a tenor called Rhon Carter sings. He comes sweeping in across the choir starting way up high, and climbs still higher. Not only that he's singing a phrase with the words, 'Whom shall I send?' and the word 'send' is at the end of the phrase and higher than the rest. Yet he soars up there without seeming effort, and sings what is an awful word to sing up high with consummate ease. Just wonderful.

It's only when I look on Google for this choir that I find that 'singing men/women' is a common title for choirs in the States.

On a less positive note, the Dell computer I ordered on the 19th of January has gone AWOL. The printer arrived a couple of weeks ago, but nothing else has come in. I've been in touch with a woman by email who's supposed to be handling the problem personally, but I haven't heard a peep out of her today, even though she promised some information. It's becoming hard to digest it as time continues to pass by. It was only when I started to make a fuss that anyone did anything. Prior to that the order had got to the point of vanishing off the horizon altogether. Scary, when you've parted out cash in advance.

To give them credit, the last time we ordered a computer from them (the laptop) it arrived safe and sound on time and has worked perfectly since. So will this one, no doubt, once it gets here....finally!

Jephtha by Handel

I think I may have spelt the name of this oratorio wrongly in a recent post on my other blog. One of the difficulties of travelling and typing: you don’t always get a chance to check the details.
Anyway, as I mentioned elsewhere it was being rehearsed when we came across it. The group performing it were the Orlando Choir, a group which specialises in baroque music. The only soloist we heard rehearse was a youngish man called Alexander Ashworth, a bass-baritone. He has a fine and fluid voice, and sang in a remarkably relaxed style.
The choir was also dealing with Handel’s constant runs and scales with ease, and also with the fugues that permeate his works. This is another amateur choir - amateur here in London doesn’t mean that the work will be done in a slapdash fashion, or done without professionalism and skill. The Orlando, the BBC, the Philharmonia, the Crouch End and the Trinity boys’ choirs were all remarkable in their professionalism, even though, as far as I can tell, these people don’t actually sing for a living. (Though the boys’ choir has done so many concerts and tours that they might as well - can’t imagine when they get their schoolwork done.)
The conductor - a very relaxed fellow, too - was James Weeks. I don’t know how old he is, but he didn’t seem to be more than in his early thirties. Hang on, he was born in 1978, so that makes only 29. Apparently he has at least thirty hours in the day, because apart from conducting the Orlando, he conducts another choir - the Exaudi Vocal Ensemble; he freelances with other choirs, he plays the organ, he writes on organists and contemporary music - and he composes. Crikey.