"Engage the enemy more closely"

... was actually Nelson's last signal to the fleet at Trafalgar (after "England expects that every man will do his duty"). Not a lot of people know that :-) I mention it because I was lucky enough to be at the International Fleet Review yesterday, which was great, but caused me to feel like death warmed up throughout tonight's rehearsal, because I got home at 5.45 am and had to be at work at 8.45 :-(

Not much to say due to this. Also there was no Jamie - don't know why (they never tell us!) Apparently we'd been due to have Fanny (although the schedule didn't mention that) but she couldn't come, so David stepped in at the last minute, bringing with him a replacement pianist. I've forgotten her name but she did really well, particularly in the opera stuff. Gerontius threw her a bit, but it isn't easy!

We did all the opera stuff (well, except Brindisi, but we know that pretty well) and the end of the Demons' Chorus from Gerontius. Another amusing warmup with Maggie prior to all this; my highlight was when she got to the usual "relax your jaw" bit of the facial stretches and pointed out that the men couldn't talk with their faces like that (they'd been giving her a hard time by chattering incessantly when she was trying to give instructions), so of course they all promptly tried to prove that they could. They may have had second thoughts if they could have seen themselves in a mirror! Also amusing was when she got us to practise the demonic "ha! ha!" bits - turned out the men can easily sound demonic, but the ladies just sound like cackling witches... Mind you, it's possible that that's what Elgar wanted, I suppose :p

Fire Chorus is sounding better all the time. The basses did ask if they could go over their notes at the bottom of page 38. I must admit I hadn't noticed it was wrong, and neither had David; he said "I think it would be counterproductive for you to hear what you're supposed to be doing!" And I'm still not convinced that they're singing their last entry on page 90 of gerontius in unison, although it does sound closer to it than it ever has in the past...

A couple of people have said to me that the mp3s of the opera choruses were useful, which is good news. So I've completed the set by putting up the Scottish Refugees chorus as well. Not that I expect anyone needs to practise it as much as the others - it's mainly for Jane, who really likes it :-)

Chorus of the Scottish Refugees (7.2 MB)

"Sopranos, you switch on like lights in a city - gradually, over half an hour."

Ladies' sectional tonight, at the BBC. The studio was FABULOUSLY cool - wish we could rehearse there all the time! I was made still cooler by the fact that just after I arrived, Margery handed me a bottle of water and asked me if I could open it for her. Needless to say, it turned out to be sparkling water that had been shaken, and it went EVERYWHERE! Thanks, Margery :p

There are those who may be thinking that Jamie needed to be drenched with water tonight... He was in one of those moods in which he appeared to be enjoying himself to an almost alarming extent! Several times I heard different people comment "I want some of what he's on!" I think my favourite moment was during the Fire Chorus. He decided it would be useful for us to sing page 42 to "ha ha ha", while singing all offbeat quavers as loudly as possible and all onbeat quavers very quietly. He demonstrated this - so impressively that we gaped with open mouths ("I've been practising all day!" he said afterwards) - but the bit that amused me was that Meg walked in while this performance was going on, and didn't bat an eyelid!

The Fire Chorus sounds pretty good now. We spent a bit of time getting the Italian words right (at speed). After a few minutes of us rattling off some of the lines, Jamie commented how bizarre this might appear to outsiders. "Imagine an alien walking in!" he said. "Imagine an Italian!" retorted someone.

There was also something about how Cheshire and North Wales are quite different but wouldn't appear so to a Brazilian. Wish I could remember what on earth this had to do with Verdi!

We also did the Carmen finale (which prompted the comment in the title) and a few Gerontius bits (p95-102; p169-end; p126-147). Three final Jamieisms:

"I love the way you count with your tummies!"

"Descending semitone MISERY, ladies!"

"Sopranos, if Manchester is where we want to be, let's just say that note was only at about Macclesfield." [They try again.] "We're nearly at Stockport! It's amazing!" [And again.] "We're RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY FLAT! ... Which is in the centre of Manchester. You realised that, right?"

"She's dumping Paul Scholes for David Beckham..."

... and if I've understood things correctly, Paul Scholes kills her because of this...

NOTE: This is Jamie's explanation of the story of Carmen (Don Jose = Paul Scholes, Escamillo the champion bullfighter = David Beckham). We are in no way suggesting that anyone has actually dumped Paul Scholes, least of all for David Beckham, and we are DEFINITELY not suggesting that Paul Scholes has killed anyone!

Opera choruses tonight - all of them, including the Carmen finale (as you might have gathered), which is a relief because we hadn't tried that one before tonight! Before I forget, Gill asked me if I could provide practice tapes (or something similar) for Fuoco di Gioia and Carmen. Choir members are welcome to download mp3s of these which I have put online (I will be removing them after the gig - they are for study only):

Carmen finale (page 372-384) (8.5 MB)
Carmen finale (page 384-end) (4.3 MB)
Fuoco di Gioia (3.2 MB)

Hopefully the mp3s will solve any problems. If need be, though, I can make helpful amendments!

An amusing moment during the warmup, when the basses kept chatting and Maggie had to shush them several times. Finally, exasperatedly, she said to Cliff "I'll put you over my knee!" He didn't look too displeased by the prospect :p

Started with the Fire Chorus ("Fuoco di Gioia"). Could tell the men had had a sectional last night - actual pitches were discernible on the infamous bit on page 41, and page 43 sounded extremely confident! Scottish Refugees came next - I told Jane this was boring. She liked it. But that's probably because she's only sung it once...

Then a bit of time on Brindisi, which is always a laugh. Lots of practice at breathing in on a high-positioned "ah" vowel. Jamie's "in/out face" while demonstrating it was amusing :p Also a bit of work was done on making the low notes audible. Jamie reckons Mark will never have heard them before (they're usually inaudible). Apparently Mark commented after Tannhaüser that he'd never heard our bit in tune before - in opera houses, says Jamie, it's usually sung with a "healthy vibrato" (air quotes, pained look) which isn't conducive to singing in tune!

Finished with the Carmen finale, which wasn't too hard once we got used to it, but was a bit of a shock at first because it was extremely fast AND in French (I find singing in French harder than any other language, and I know I'm not alone in this). (Apologies for the pronunciation of the French on the mp3s, btw - it's not great!) During the course of learning this, Jamie decided to make a badge for each of the sopranos saying: "I'm not going to reach for the top notes!" This was followed by a diversion in which he quoted from Shrek 2... "Are we there yet?"

And unbelievably we finished 5 minutes early! I think the clock must have been wrong...

Jamie: "OK, let's sing it." [basses groan] Jamie: "It's ONE NOTE!"

(apologies for taking so long to finish this post - I seem to be exhausted all the time at the moment)

Well, I ended up with 3 American guests in the end, and they were lovely. They gave me a model of a lighthouse that's near where they live - apparently there are hundreds of (working) lighthouses all along the shore of Lake Michigan!

My guests, along with several other members of the Battle Creek group, watched the second half of our rehearsal tonight, when Jamie picked out the most showy-off bits of Gerontius for us to do. (Well, it might have been a coincidence that he picked those bits when we had an audience, but we don't think so!) Just as well they weren't there for the first half, when we had another attempt to make the Fire Chorus sound like Verdi...

The title of this post comes from rehearsing the comedy bass line "l'ultimo guizzo lampeggia e muor" - this comes at the end of a page in which the other parts all have very short easy phrases. It seemed to be the words that were the problem (the notes are all bottom Bs) so Jamie made us all say it repeatedly. I don't think the basses were really alarmed at the prospect of singing it after that, it's just a knee-jerk choral singer's reaction :p

There was lots of singing each other's parts tonight, in order to consolidate some of the notes. I was particularly amused at the tenor and bass "movono intorno mutando stuol" - turns out that this line, which has been dire every time, sounds great if the men are instructed to ignore the pitches - and the words - and the dynamics...

Other bits I liked:

The fact that I now have "Haka Dalek bit" written in my score (on the "fuga la notte col suo splendor" scale up)

Jamie: Do you feel your tummy going "What are you DOING?!?"

Jamie: Did you just SWOOP?!? (it was the accompanying eyebrows here!) But David almost outdid this with his eyebrows when he heard Jamie give the instruction "Tune into David FM" (i.e. listen to the accompaniment so you don't speed up).

After break (with an audience, as already mentioned): Gerontius: p41-54 (end of part 1); Demons p70-91; Praise p125-147. Less to note here, but let's see: there was the "Haka Who" on the bottom of p78; Jamie's F face on "feet", p81 (you had to see it...); the fact that the basses are (as I have pointed out!) wrongly singing in harmony on p90 for the last "ha! ha!"; and the experimentation on how to sing "hosts" on p79 - Noel Coward? Russian? I'm not sure what the final verdict was!

Great choral moments, part 2

Further discussion of the English surtitling thing here.

I have to clean the house very urgently, before two members of the Battle Creek choir arrive tomorrow. So as usual when I have cleaning to do, I have been finding all sorts of more urgent things to do first :-) I really am about to get the hoover out, but first I thought I'd post another choral moment that I was reminded of recently.

This one is from 17th July 1999: singing the Berlioz Grande Messe des Morts in York Minster, with 2 extra choirs, 4 brass bands (in the 4 corners of the Minster) and the biggest orchestra EVER, including (I think) FIFTEEN timps. I was singing tenor on that occasion (there is no alto part in that piece, so Keith asked for volunteers who were finding the sop part painful). This turned out to have been a great decision on my part, because it meant that I got to sit at the front, right behind the timps (there were about a MILLION ladies, so they put them all at the back!), and next to the lovely Bruce, who I think had only joined the choir relatively recently (certainly I hadn't talked to him much before that day). There were several wonderful moments when all the brass and percussion played very loudly at once, but the best was the Neapolitan 6th chord in the Lacrymosa. Bruce and I both shouted "WOW!!!!" at the tops of our voices, involuntarily, IN THE ACTUAL CONCERT. It was fine - no-one could hear us :-)

"If you rush, you're dead. (Not literally.)"

At the RNCM tonight, which was great in that it wasn't WHGS, but bad in that the concert hall was very airless and very hot. Oh well. Did two things - first half of rehearsal on the Fire Chorus, and second half on a chunk of Gerontius (from the Angelicals bit to the Praise to the Holiest bit). Fire Chorus is now just about recognisable as Verdi rather than, say, Stockhausen, although there's still quite a way to go.

Jamie mentioned at one point about the ENO plan to use surtitles on English operas (which is of course all they sing, but still). His comment? "I was there [at ENO] last night, and... well, let's just say that we ought to work harder at our diction..."

Oh, and do point friends towards the Sing With The Hallé day website, which has just gone live.

I'm falling asleep, I'm afraid, so I'm just going to list tonight's Jamieisms (which were many!). These are in the order in which they're scribbled in my score as opposed to the order in which they occurred...

Fire Chorus:

(to the basses on page 2) "It sounds a bit too much like you're from Gerrards Cross."
(to everyone) "Get your tongue involved, folks - in fact that's probably good advice for life in general."
(on trying to get us to put the rolled r of the last word before the next beat - first he tried getting us to tap our feet on the next beat) "It's like a bad Charleston. Forget the foot, click your fingers."
(after witnessing the result of this) "Gentlemen, watch the cheese!"

Gerontius pages 95-147:

He made the tenors sing a top Eb (a minor tenth above middle C) in order to improve the Eb below, on page 106. The basses' faces were a picture, especially when Jamie turned to them and said "You must warm up in falsetto too!" Then: "Write it in, tenors: we did this bar well once..."

Page 108 prompted the idea that we should get a sign printed to stick on the door, and/or a T shirt for Jamie to wear, with a picture of an ice cream cone and the text "NO SCOOPING!"

Page 108 also sparked off the surreal few minutes which started with him asking the altos to think 2 octaves higher for our last note, and somehow caused him to start to tell us about Eddie Izzard and Engelbert Humperdinck and then say he'd tell us another time, leaving us all baffled... This may shed some light on the subject. But then, it may not :-)

Great choral moments, part 1

As promised!

This isn't the first one I thought of when I said I'd start this series of posts, but I was just reminded of it so thought I'd post it while it was in my mind. Plus, I already wrote about it elsewhere at the time, so I can put it here with a quick copy & paste :p

Last November (the date is significant, as you'll see later if you consider it) we had a really good Hallé gig - Beethoven 7, Beethoven "Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage" (no, I'd never heard of the Beethoven version either) and some Mahler songs (from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn"). Since the choir was only in the second item, we got to sit and listen for most of the time, and the symphony was fantastic. But even that wasn't the great moment.

It was in the warm up. We warm up very intensively, for at least 20 minutes before we sing, and Jamie (the choral director) likes to vary his approach (although it always involves stretching the body and face, followed by breathing exercises, followed by pitchless vocal exercises, followed by pitched vocal exercises). One that he uses quite often is the "sing a chord" one, because most of the choir find this extremely difficult (which always surprises me). So no-one batted an eyelid when on Saturday he suddenly interrupted our "sliding V" exercise to say "Sing a G major chord." Followed by "C major. G. D. G. C. G. D. G." (A few people were looking relieved that he was sticking to such an easy chord progression for a change.)

I'm still annoyed I didn't catch on before this, but: Jamie then said "Now add the tune!" and suddenly the whole choir of 150, crammed into our backstage warmup area, were singing a harmonised-on-the-fly a cappella version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot". With only a few shouted instructions from Jamie, we modulated a couple of times, ending in a key which allowed the 1st sopranos to show off on the last note. And with that the warm up ended, and we went on stage to perform.

It's always a fantastic feeling singing in the middle of a really good choir - but this was extra special. Everyone was just buzzing - the whole choir went on stage with huge grins on their faces. (The concert was almost an anti-climax!) It's really hard to convey what this felt like to someone who's not experienced anything similar. But it was good :-)