Bad news, I'm afraid

We finally found out what happened to the little bird with the broken wing. (It was in the programme notes.) It got captured by the hawk! Now, it was not clearly stated that it actually died, but we think it's quite likely :-(

Apart from that, though, a good time was had by all tonight. It was a long day - we rehearsed from 3.30 (and some of us had been in a choir committee meeting from 1.30 till then) and came offstage for the last time at about 10.05. Didn't get much rehearsal with the orchestra, but then it wasn't really needed; we warmed up and rehearsed a few bits backstage, then went onto the platform and sang through the spirituals during the orchestra break, then listened to the whole of the Ritual Dances (so we knew where to come in) and joined in at the end. The piece is a lot more exciting with full orchestra, as usual.

I actually remembered to bring my camera today, due to realising that there have been no new pictures on the choir website since last September. Didn't get any really great ones, but the ones I did get are now online. Also, I'd totally forgotten that the concert was being recorded by Radio 3, until I got onstage and saw all the mics. Apparently it'll be broadcast on Tuesday 8th March.

First half started (after Mark's usual entertaining speech) with Leonora no. 1, which I don't think I've ever heard before. Pleasant but not that inspiring, IMHO. Then it was time for the Ritual Dances. They were more fun than I'd expected (I particularly liked the impressive clarinet duet). The piece was very descriptive - we could clearly hear where the little bird with the broken wing got caught by the hawk :-( We only joined in right at the end; not our best performance of the piece, but nothing went disastrously wrong. Our first note felt pretty good, though. And at least the audience seemed to like it (surprisingly so!).

I was delighted, during the interval, to talk to Richard (one of our newer tenors) and learn that he joined the choir because of my website! I feel I should get some sort of cash prize for enlisting a tenor, albeit unwittingly :p

Second half was less fun than the first, as it mostly consisted of Tippett's Triple Concerto. This is one of his later works and has far less concordant harmony than the Ritual Dances. There were two bits I did quite like - the last note (no, not just because it was the last note!) and the bit in the middle when all the Indonesian percussion started to play. Apart from that I couldn't engage with it at all and found myself struggling to stay awake. I did better than some others - one person said she hated it so much she wanted to run from the hall screaming! It was impressively played, though, and again the audience seemed unaccountably enthusiastic. Some of them actually cheered! We decided they were either Tippett's family or part of the Mark Elder fan club.

The last item in the main concert was Leonora no. 3; bits of it seemed familiar, but most of it was new to me. Again, pleasant enough, and rather more interesting than no. 1. I particularly liked the unexpected offstage trumpet; Gill and I tried to decide what it is about an offstage trumpet that is so spinetingling, and didn't reach a conclusive answer, but agreed that we love it :-)

After the bows we went offstage and came straight back on again (for some reason) for the spirituals. We were delighted to see how many of the audience had stayed for this "post-concert event"; the stalls were full (although admittedly this seemed to be because they were sending the circle people down there as well) so the hall looked pleasantly crowded. The lighting was much more atmospheric than we usually have - the stage was in total darkness, as was the auditorium; only the choir seats were illuminated. When Jamie came on we could hardly see him, as he was wearing all black, but when he reached the podium he got an impressive spotlight. Unfortunately his face was still not lit, which was not ideal from a conducting point of view (he uses his face a lot!) but we managed. The performance went pretty well; the soloists were great, and the choir stayed in tune. And more importantly, the BFBABTEIGW sounded more or less right from where I was standing! \o/ The radio broadcast will be very telling...

P.S. Sylvia pointed out to me tonight that people could only post comments to this blog if they got a Blogger account (which is free, but a bit of a hassle). So I've found that setting and changed it. Post away, Sylvia!

"Then you sing about carnal doo-dahs...”

I went home on my own tonight (Alison was poorly) but had a huge grin on my face for most of the time. This was for 3 main reasons. The most immediate was something Daphne said to me as we were all leaving the rehearsal, but the grin would've been there anyway as a result of Mark Elder - I'm not sure what it is about him that's so inspirational, but he manages it every single time. More of that in a second. But first, the third reason (and you'd better sit down before reading any further): the BFBABTEIGW is now almost right! It got better each time we did it, and by the last time I could hear more right versions around me than wrong ones. I think this is probably due to Clare - I suddenly heard (the second or third time we did it) the correct version being sung very clearly by one person behind me, and I turned to see who it was, and it was Clare, who appeared to be as irritated as me. Now she usually gets things right, so I'm sure she was singing it right all along, but maybe she just decided to sing louder in order to banish the wrong version. Whatever, I'm very grateful to her. There's a good chance it'll be right on the night now, and it would've spoiled the performance for me if it'd been wrong.

As for the rest of the rehearsal, it was unexpectedly wide-ranging. We'd expected to just do the Ritual Dances with Mark, with maybe a sing through the Spirituals if he finished early. But we also did Elgar and Mascagni. (The Mascagni was just a sing-through so that we'd heard it at least once with all the parts together - it's going to be great fun, from the sound of it. The tenors sounded as if they were getting properly into the spirit of the drinking song... Bruce, in particular, was plainly having a fabulous time!) The Elgar was unintended, I think, but when Mark finished everything he wanted to do on the Tippett, there was half an hour left, and he asked if we had anything else we could entertain him with, so we sang straight through the first half of the Elgar. Mark appeared to like it; he was mouthing the tenor part throughout (not because they were at fault, I hasten to add, he was just joining in!)

We spent almost an hour on the Spirituals before Mark turned up, and they're now much better. I've already mentioned the BFBABTEIGW. (Which, by the way, I listened to on two different recordings today. The Sixteen managed to get that bar right, but the LSO Chorus didn't, despite having an accompanying orchestra playing the right notes!) The key changes between some of the movements were still being problematic, particularly from Go Down Moses to By and By, so Jamie rehearsed that one a lot so as to get the muscle memory to kick in. Oh, and what Daphne said to me (that caused me to go home grinning) was that some of the sopranos had come up with a theory that the reason the choir is finding that particular segue difficult to pitch is that By and By starts with just choir 1 singing... i.e. the 2nd altos aren't. And, more specifically, that means that I'm not singing, and, according to Daphne, I am "known as a note-getter". Now, I'm not convinced I have anywhere near as much influence as they're implying, but it's nice to know they think that :-)

We had a chance to do a quick revision of the Ritual Dances and the aforementioned whizz through Cavalleria Rusticana before Mark turned up at 8.30 to run through the Ritual Dances. All went fine. He's looking forward to the weekend - apparently "all the London critics are coming" to the Tippett festival. Oh, and he supplied my favourite quote of the night: “This is, to my certain knowledge, the only opera libretto containing the word ‘sperm’ ... “

"Reduced to notebashing! Oh, the shame!"

I expected to do just Tippett tonight, with the gig being on Saturday and the piano rehearsal tomorrow, but we started with the Elgar. Spent some time on the middle bit. (We might have got further if certain sections of the choir had actually written "enlisTID" and "resisTID" in their copies when it was first mentioned... I really hope that doesn't have to be mentioned again!) I was slightly distracted by wondering what I meant by "bb", which I seem to have written in several places in my score. It was a while before I realised it stood for "big breath". (Most of my abbreviations are ones I've been writing for years, such as LTYT, HTYT, FTYT, STYT, IO, IM, IB, IT, IS, SN; people who've sat near me will know what some of those stand for! But "bb" was a new one.) (Oh, and also I like the bit on p. 54 where everyone's holding a long loud Eb and in the middle of it the altos go up the octave. "Such a great idea! And it's probably a misprint!" was Jamie's comment.)

Distraction of a different kind after the break, when a lovely beanie-clad guy came and sat next to David to page-turn for the Ritual Dances, while Naomi was taking someone to catch a tram. Couldn't work out who on earth he was, but very much enjoyed looking at him ;-) We did wonder (with a certain degree of hopefulness!) whether he was going to be involved in the promised "perpetual copulation" :p (we'd been given a synopsis of the plot of The Midsummer Marriage which mentioned this; Gill, typically, spotted the interesting bit immediately... but we were disappointed when we realised that it didn't mention the fate of the little bird! We're worried!)

Turned out that the mysterious yummy guy was the tenor soloist for the spirituals - I didn't recognise him due to the beanie, which I'm pretty sure he wasn't wearing last time. Great voice though. (Well, all four of them are great. The bass was missing tonight because he was singing elsewhere, but we'll see him soon enough, I guess.) The spirituals were mostly OK, but they need to be better by Saturday; today's falling-apart-at-the-seams bit was the link between the first two movements (G major to C minor - shouldn't be that hard, but (a) it took many people by surprise, and (b) it relies on the MEN to start on the right note!), but hopefully that will be OK next time, after Jamie rehearsed it pretty thoroughly. I've given up on the BFBABTEIGW. It'll just have to be wrong on the night - I've tried my best. "Nobody Knows" is mostly correct now, though, so at least some progress has been made!

Tomorrow night: same time, same place, different conductor - it's the Tippett piano rehearsal with Mark. He's usually pretty good at inspiring the choir to make that extra effort that gets the performance from "good" to "great" - let's hope this time is no different.

"There's no blood YET..."

Soprano and alto sectional tonight. Spent it being introduced to Cavalleria Rusticana, which we're doing with Mark in April. Jamie told us the story. Apparently the tenor "interrupts the overture to sing a love song... to the WRONG GIRL!" Of course he dies in the end. This led me to wonder whether the eternal shortage of tenors is in fact caused by this tendency of theirs to get themselves killed by jealous rivals. Maybe that's a possible topic to investigate for my OU project this year :-)

The music's not that hard - or at least it wasn't when we were sight reading it without the words! There's one ridiculously high bit (goes up to a top Ab!) (well, strictly the alto part doesn't, but since it's identical to the soprano part except for a few random notes put down the octave, most of us are just singing the soprano part - it's actually easier to stay up there once we've made it) but it's actually not that bad... without the words. (I can sing as high as you like, as long as it's loud and I can use random vowels!) But sooner or later we had to put the words in. I actually love singing in Italian once the words have sunk in, but it's hard to learn in, despite the fact that it's "all vowels, except for the consonants" (a typical Jamieism!)

There were a few good Jamieisms tonight. Mind you, we'd got the giggles during the warmup (which not only featured the notorious "red leather yellow leather lavender leather" exercise" but also a new one, even more evil, to the increasingly rapidly repeated words "kit kat kit kat"). But I was amused by "the words 'rocket science' spring to mind" when the poor guy was trying to explain to some of the slower members of the choir that a particular note needed to be held for an extra bar. (Seemed perfectly clear to me, but maybe I could hear better then people further back.) And then there was the bit where he said "I'll get some hiking boots and send them to you as an email attachment so that you can use them for the GUILT TRIP you'll be taking!" (I forget what the guilty party was supposed to be feeling guilty about, although it was probably not stopping the sound in a double consonant...)

Concert week next week. That means choir stuff on Wednesday, Thursday and most of Saturday. Promises to be exhausting, particularly as I'm also out on Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. Ouch. Oh well, it's usually fun :-)

Note to self: Write stuff other than Jamieisms next time!

"Gosh, this is fun!"

... said Jamie, while we were trying to get the Ritual Dances into our heads. It's really not that hard (although also not in the LEAST tuneful), and after spending the first half of the rehearsal on it, I think most people are quite a bit more comfortable with the thought of performing it next week.

(Jamie's comments progressed from "It goes up, you know THAT much!" - while trying to get the tenors and 2nd sops to actually have a go at the bar they couldn't do - to "You know what? That sounds remarkably close to what I've got printed on my page! Aren't you clever?")

Much hilarity after the break, when we switched to the spirituals. We started with the middle bit of "Nobody Knows"... for a while, no-one (even the altos!) could sing the "O" of "O brothers" to Jamie's satisfaction; he claimed we were all starting from above or below the correct pitch. Then he got the idea that this might be because of the way he'd brought us in, so he experimented with various hand gestures that might improve matters, but this led to "Maybe you need to stand at an angle..."

The bar everyone's getting wrong in "Nobody Knows"... well, not everyone is, but an awful lot still are. I think people have started to realise; at one point when Jamie was waiting to start "Go Down Moses", several altos behind me could be heard humming said bar (some more accurately than others!) As for GDM, I'm again disappointed that lots of people who couldn't do it last week seem not to have looked at it since. Mind you, I'm not much better myself - I can sing the notes and rhythm with perfect accuracy, but I keep meaning to see if I can do anything about my breathing problems in those very long phrases, and I haven't had time yet.

The change to "By and By" wasn't much better than last week, until it had been practised a few times. (I'm not entirely sure why it's so hard for the sops to get an E from an F, particularly when they've sung an E the previous note (admittedly in a different octave, but still).) And yes, *that* bar is still mostly wrong, although there are a few people singing it right now.

We finished with the wonderful "Deep River", during which Gill and I realised how hard we were finding it to sing the "Oh Chillun" arpeggio - Jamie was getting everyone to do the revving motorbike effect on it, but one of the revs is just on the break in our voices and hence harder. Must give that some thought.

"Let my people ... HAVE A go AT SIGHT READING!"

We finally did Go Down Moses! \o/ I was delighted. Particularly because I had a vocal coaching session during part of tonight's rehearsal, so I was sure he'd choose that moment to go Way Down in Egypt Land. But as it turned out I just missed a bit of The Music Makers, which occupied the first half of the rehearsal. (And it was only the first half of the piece, so I didn't even miss doing the end bit that I missed due to football.)

Go Down Moses started the second half. Unfortunately it wasn't very good. And I think it would be fair to say that most of the rest of the choir don't like it as much as I do. But I was rather irritated that a good many people obviously hadn't so much as glanced at it since the time we sight-read through it about 6 weeks ago, despite the fact that it was clearly very different from the Child of our Time version, and somewhat more difficult. Now I didn't seriously expect that everyone would have taken it home and practised it, but it was fairly apparent that many people hadn't even bothered to mark which line they should be singing. Bit rubbish IMHO. And it didn't give a very good impression to the 4 soloists (from the RNCM), who turned up to run through all the spirituals just when we were showing that we can't do Go Down Moses very well. However, it did get better, and I'm sure it'll be fine on the night.

(Brief hilarity when we got to the end of GDM for about the fifth time and Jamie went straight into By and By. Which, to be fair, he had said ages ago was the plan. But the noises that emerged when the choir tried to go from F minor to A major without warning were... well, kind of like the other bits of Child of our Time, IYSWIM :-)

One bit of good news concerning the BFBABTEIGW, though. Most people are still getting it wrong, but Gill, bless her, who was sitting next to me, got it right tonight, which made it much easier for me to do the same. (Usually I can stick to the correct line even if everyone around me is singing it wrong, but with this particular note I can't for some reason.) Ditto for Nobody Knows. So there's hope! (The thing is, Gill does actually know when she gets something wrong, and can correct it. There are some people who are seemingly oblivious, so it's very hard to get them to change something.)

"But, Jamie, what happened to the little bird with the broken wing?"

Seems like ages since last week's gig. Tonight was back to normal. Much praise and thanks from Jamie though, and apparently we made nearly £50,000. And, it seems, the BBC Phil were impressed :-)

We started with The Music Makers. Seems like ages since I sang it, due to going to the match last week. It's sounding pretty good. Progress was made on page 62, where the basses are now singing in the same key as everyone else :p I was also reminded that I meant to listen to my other Elgar recordings - I want to hear which bits are quoted. (Jamie pointed out the bit on page 69 that's the big tune from the 1st Symphony. I didn't think I'd heard the 1st Symphony, but that tune is very familiar, so maybe I have. And that reminded me that I've not heard the 2nd Symphony for years - I studied it in depth on an OU music course, and have played it, but I don't think I've heard it since.)

At the end of page 69 I appear to have written "WORD!", which amuses me each time we get to that point. It's actually shorthand for "think about the placement of the vowel sound while singing this word, and at the same time sing it as if you're DOING it" (the word is "cry"). But still. As for page 78 to the end, I think I've only sung it once, and that was ages ago. Apparently they spent a lot of time on it last week, so I've had a look through to check I can sing it, and transferred markings. Not too hard, but I hope we do it soon.

We did the Spirituals. Well, three of them. And guess what? The BFBABTEIGW? Everyone's still getting it wrong. Ditto for Nobody Knows. And we STILL didn't do Go Down Moses!

Oh, but I nearly forgot - we did do one thing that we'd been expecting to do long before now. The "other" Tippett, i.e. the Ritual Dances. The concert's on 26th February, yet this is the first time we looked at it. (I sang through it with the CD when I got home from work today, just in case today was the day - it's not too hard, and there's hardly any of it.) Jamie introduced it, though, by telling us the story of the opera they're taken from ("The Midsummer Marriage"). He's very good at this - one of the best rehearsals EVER was the one a couple of years ago when he introduced Iolanthe to us. That was also a good rehearsal because he managed to create an amazing new sound during the warm-up - one that still had everyone talking about it after the rehearsal, several hours later - but it's not often I've laughed as hard as I did during Jamie's telling of the Iolanthe story :p

Well, tonight it went something like this...

JAMIE: There's a hare being chased by a fox.

CHOIR: Awww!

JAMIE: But the hare gets away!

CHOIR: Hurray!

JAMIE: And then there's a fish being chased by an otter.

CHOIR: Awww!

JAMIE: And the fish gets slightly injured.

CHOIR: *outraged*

JAMIE: But it gets away!

CHOIR: Hurray! Hurray!

JAMIE: And then there's a little bird with a broken wing.

CHOIR: Awwwwwwwwwwwww!

JAMIE: And it gets chased by a hawk!

CHOIR: *beside themselves with worry*

JAMIE: But at that point the story suddenly switches to another part.

[cut: further explanation of story, plus an hour's rehearsal of the music]

JAMIE: So. Let's leave that piece for tonight. Any questions?

CHOIR: What happened to the little bird with the broken wing?