Mmm, Clark Kent!

What?!? I'm watching Smallville :-)

So, sorry for the delay in posting after London. I got distracted by non-choir things... (not all of which were World of Warcraft!)

I've just put up my photos from London - mostly not great, but some people may like to see them anyway. [EDIT: I've now added some more photos from Graham, and will add more as they are sent to me.] The Greenwich Pier one may need explaining - in the Sunday afternoon break I went to the National Maritime Museum to see the Nelson and Napoleon exhibition (which was great, btw - you should all go!) If you want a musical reason to go, it includes the autograph scores of both Haydn's Nelson Mass and Beethoven's Eroica Symphony (the one where he scratched out Napoleon's name from the title page - I see now why they said "scratched" instead of "crossed", it made quite a hole!) Anyway, I wanted to get a boat back to Embankment - prettier than the tube, and slightly less scary... or so I thought. As I walked onto the pier, a policeman started unfurling a "police line, do not cross" tape, and asked everyone to step away. A minute later, a police van turned up, sirens screaming and lights flashing. Loads of them jumped out and started asking everyone to move right away. I decided that it was probably a good plan to abandon the boat idea and go back the way I'd come - on the tube.

Anyway, the gig! Some reviews:

Manchester Evening News
Guardian
Times
Telegraph
Independent
London Evening Standard
Music OMH.com

General gist seems to be 4 stars, doesn't it? Although they do all say nice things about the choir. I actually thought Sunday's performance wasn't quite as good as the Manchester one (though only because of tiny things - a couple of places where people weren't watching and didn't notice how much Mark had slowed down, or an early S here and there). It was great though. I must say I felt a little frustrated watching it on TV when I got home, because the impact of the live performance just wasn't there. And was anyone else REALLY irritated by Verity thingummy listing the London choir first every time?

(If anyone hasn't managed to see the TV broadcast and would like to, a friend of mine has it on his hard disk, and we should be able to put it on a DVD sometime in the next week or two. Let me know if you want a copy. Oh, and remember that you can still listen online for the next few days.)

The trip as a whole was a great success, due largely to Naomi's fabulous organisation. I felt sorry for her when I arrived at the Bridgewater Hall on Saturday afternoon to find that the coaches couldn't get near the hall because of a passing Caribbean carnival!

SASHGATE!

Well, the gig tonight was FANTASTIC. But it almost wasn't, because it looked for a while as if there was going to be a bit of a rebellion, which wouldn't have had people in the right mood at all. Luckily Jamie sorted out the problem by speaking to Mark on our behalf, and a possible crisis was averted.

That was probably all a bit cryptic, wasn't it? At least to those who weren't there... Here's what happened. The gig (and Sunday's Proms gig) featured 3 choirs: us, the Hallé Youth Choir, and the London Philharmonic Choir. The ladies of the LPC wear long black outfits of their own choice. The ladies of the Hallé Choir wear standard long black outfits with turquoise sashes. The girls of the Youth Choir wear red short-sleeved shirts (with black skirts). Well, at the rehearsal this morning, Naomi announced that we wouldn't be wearing our sashes in either concert, so that we would look the same as the LPC. The amount of instant bad feeling this created was immense. People were using words such as "angry", "furious", "livid", "militant"... one person even said "I'm so upset about this that I can't sing". Within a few minutes, all the altos around me had agreed that we needed an urgent alto section meeting at the break so that people could voice their displeasure. This took place, and Judith and I (as alto reps on the committee) agreed to approach Jamie and/or Naomi to convey people's views. We met Meg and Cathy before we did this, who were about to do the same on behalf of the sops.

We spoke to Jamie and Naomi together and learned that it was Mark who had made the decision. Jamie thought that people would probably be OK with the decision when Mark explained the reason for it (i.e. that he thought it would look better on TV). We disagreed and reiterated how strongly people felt about it. (People have a real sense of pride about being visibly a member of the *Hallé* Choir, as opposed to just a generic "main chorus" as contrasted with the Youth Choir, and to have the only outward symbol of this removed - just when we will be at our most visible - is what everyone was upset about.) Jamie agreed to speak to Mark.

We never did get an official announcement, but at the end of the rehearsal Jamie could be seen talking animatedly to Mark for several minutes; Mark appeared to just listen without commenting. But it was not long after that that the word was spread that we could wear the sashes \o/

I was actually quite worried about what might have happened if Jamie hadn't persuaded Mark. A lot of people were saying "I don't care what they say, I'm wearing it, there's not much they can do if we all do it, is there?" Another representative comment was "I don't often get militant, but I'm feeling militant about this!" So thank goodness he stood up for us :-)

There's not much to say about the concert itself, because it was just GREAT. No disasters. Not even anything that "went a bit wrong" (or at least, not as far as I can remember). Soloists were fabulous (and Alice Coote looked truly angelic in a lovely white dress). Orchestra (91 of them on stage, I counted!) were fabulous. Mark was fabulous. All three choirs were fabulous (though I say so myself!) I was very impressed with the LPC. We've had choirs singing with us in the past who know the music well enough but totally ignore stage instructions (such as, keep your folder open at the end till you sit down). The LPC behaved impeccably, so I'm glad we're doing other stuff with them soon, not just Sunday! (Pity we're not doing more stuff with them - have you seen the stuff they're doing this year and next? I'm jealous!)

Oh, there was one of them I wasn't too impressed with, though. While I was standing talking to Judith during the interval, one of their guys (who was standing right next to us) suddenly shouted out EXTREMELY loudly. It was so loud that I was literally deafened, but Judith managed to catch what he said when we glared at him - "I'm practising being one of your tenors!" Cheeky thing! Our tenors sounded FANTASTIC. I reckon he was just jealous :p

So, we're off to London tomorrow, and home very late Sunday night. We've not had a proper choir trip for ages, so this should be fun!

ROTH!

Orchestral rehearsal for Gerontius tonight. Went pretty well. The London Philharmonic Choir got a huge round of applause for managing to get here from London today, and they sounded good. (I believe there will be more of them in the Albert Hall, not all of them could get time off work to come up to Manchester.) The soloists are all FABULOUS: Alice Coote as the Angel, Paul Groves as Gerontius, and Matthew Best as the Priest and the Angel of the Agony. The Hallé Youth Choir sounded great. The orchestra sounded great. (Although, to be fair, they always do!)

Not really much else to say about tonight. Oh, except that I spotted a Markism from last night that I forgot to mention - he was trying to get us to sound more mocking during the Demons' Chorus, and suggested thinking during the "What's a saint?" line on page 84: "Those dreadful sandals!"

Tonight's main funny moment surrounded the pronunciation (by the Youth Choir) of the word "wrath" on page 36. There was a bit of confusion among them and Mark couldn't understand the word. So he got each section of the main choir to say it. Everyone agreed it was "ROTH!" but the Youth Choir were going more along the lines of "RATH!" except with a dark A... Jamie seemed pretty pleased when they all agreed on their pronunciation, particularly since it was different to everyone else's. But Mark preferred the usual sound, so they had to give in :p

Unrelated PS: You know, ever since I first heard Gerontius I've meant to write a song which includes the Earth chord sequence (i.e. the one that comes for the first time when the Priest comes in on page 39). Maybe this summer I'll actually get round to it! (For anyone who wants to play it, the chords are: Bb, Gm6, Dm/A, F/A; Ab, Fm6, Cm/G, Eb/G; Gb, Ebm6, E dim, A7/E, A7; D. Ooooh :-)

Supertonics!

Well, just to reassure those people who asked, I am OF COURSE going to quote what Mark said about the end of Praise to the Holiest (page 147): "I don't beat, I just sort of waggle till I've had enough..."

But the Supertonics thing was more amusing, IMHO. This was when Jamie said to the men, on page 168, that he wanted high supertonics. What was funny was the way Mark kept saying it afterwards, each time accompanied by a knowing look :-) (And I'm sure most of you know, but in case there's one person that doesn't and was wondering, the supertonic is the second note of the scale. So, since the music is in E major at that point, he was referring to the F sharp.)

Piano rehearsal with Mark Elder tonight for Gerontius (she belatedly explains for those who weren't there). Great fun as usual. It'll be a good gig. (I'm so disappointed that the London show sold out before any of my friends and relatives who said they might go had got round to investigating tickets. And as usual I can't persuade ANYONE to come and see the Manchester one. It's never quite the same when there's no-one you know in the audience, is it?) We had the Hallé Youth Choir with us tonight for the first time (well, in several months) and they sounded great. They'll make lots of people very proud at the Prom, I suspect. We also had the lovely Jonathan at the piano, standing in for David.

Jamie did a very thorough warmup. Only bits to note were that he berated us at one point to say "Santa Claus is a figure of FUN!" (you had to be there...) and also he told us about a pub in Cornwall, the Lamorna Wink. I think this was while we were stretching our facial muscles by winking in an exaggerated manner...

I've already mentioned two of Mark's best bits. But there was also "You've got to be... unattractive!" (in the Demons' chorus); also the fact that the highpoint of his year is, he says, that the Hallé concert in Tatton Park has outsold Will Young, who's there the next day! My favourite, though, was the Valkyrie thing. On page 100, he told the sopranos that they ought to "be like Valkyries" in the "to serve as champion in the field" bit (yes, Graham, I know that's your favourite bit!) Jamie went over and whispered in Mark's ear that the sopranos of the Youth Choir might not know what Valkyries are. So Mark explained. Something along the lines of "they swoop down and rescue the bodies of dead heroes from the battlefield, and take them back to Valhalla. And then they, erm, give them one hell of a good time..."

Orchestral rehearsal tomorrow night. Whee!

Go, in the name of angels and archangels...

... and fill in the choir members' questionnaire if you haven't done it yet. Apparently the results are already very interesting (no, I don't know any of them) but only a small proportion of the choir have filled it in so far.

Also, if, like me, you are trying to memorize Gerontius and are irritated with the long intros on CD tracks before the choir comes in (yes, the non-choir bits are of course wonderful, but if you're trying to practise stuff in a hurry they're a bit of a pain) you might find these mp3s of use. I've edited them so they just have the choir cue. They range in size from 1.3MB to 5.9MB. As usual, for private study only, they'll be removed after the gig.

p10-14 (Holy Mary)
p16-23 (Be merciful)
p34-38 (Rescue him)
p40-54 (Go in the name)
p70-91 (Demons)
p94-109 (Angelicals)
p110-147 (Praise)
p155-157 (Lord be merciful)
p163-165 (Lord thou hast been)
p166-177 (end)

"I worry that, when it says ppp, you lose your choral mojo."

I have to say that I worry about that too. I was quite frustrated tonight. We did Gerontius - almost all of it - for the first time in a while due to the operatic interruption - and unfortunately there are a lot of people in the choir who seem to feel that because they have sung Gerontius many times and know how it goes, they don't actually need to watch the conductor, pay too much attention to the dynamics, or in fact make an awful lot of effort at all. Jamie was very conscious of this, I think, and kept accusing people of "singing along" (with good reason!). But the two main problems are (IMHO): every time the music gets quieter, the choir gets slower and flatter (but not actually very much quieter); and every time the music speeds up a bit, the choir, in general, doesn't.

My frustration wasn't helped by a few of the 1st altos who talked almost the whole way through the rehearsal. There are a couple of them who always do this, but I can't usually hear what they're saying, just the general sound of chat (not that that's not irritating when I'm trying to concentrate!) But tonight all the 2nd altos had been seated in front of the 1sts, presumably because we are so much fewer in number, but it meant that the chatterers were just too loud to ignore, although I wasn't quite close enough to turn round and speak to them unobtrusively.

I'll be in a better mood next week, I'm on holiday!

We did have a new 2nd alto tonight, actually, called Lisa. So maybe our quest for world domination is getting back on track :p

Some more Jamieisms from tonight:

"At the moment there are too many fights breaking out, chorally." (this followed a train of thought about thinking rather than running on adrenaline in the fugue, and a comment that if you don't do that, you may as well be on a rugby team, and a realisation that good rugby teams do actually think, and it's the ones who don't who end up fighting...)

"I hope you didn't miss the opportunity to practise it!" (to the sops, about their last "ha! ha!" on page 85 - it wasn't so much what Jamie said here that amused me, as the looks on the sops' faces when he told them that he'd deliberately rehearsed that bar twice without them, to save their voices and enable them to sing along mentally - it looked rather as if most of them had been daydreaming through those few minutes!)

"Say "holiest" suggestively." (Page 108. No comment.)

Oh, and someone asked to be pointed back to my annotated Gerontius post. There you are :-)

"I took my wife to a few bullfights for our silver wedding anniversary recently, as you do."

(I think the audience thought Mark was joking when he said this, but he said exactly the same to us a couple of nights earlier and went on to describe what he'd seen, so I presume he was telling the truth. We were walking offstage when he started to tell the audience about bullfighting, though, so I don't know whether or not he went into quite as graphic detail as he did with us. I hope not - some of the choir got quite upset!)

Opera gig went really well. Morning rehearsal was a little chaotic - we warmed up for a very long time, yet when we were directed to go onto the platform, the orchestra were still on their break, so we sat there for a while doing nothing. Yet with only five minutes to go, we were still offstage rehearsing Carmen, and Brindisi hadn't been touched. Amazingly we managed to get back onstage and run through Brindisi without Tom the orchestra manager having to call a halt to proceedings!

Long gap between rehearsal and concert. Some of the choir complain about these, and I must admit it is frustrating occasionally when I've got tons of work to do at home. But on the whole I really enjoy the enforced relaxing afternoon - Alison and I live too far away for it to be worth going home and coming back, so we usually make the most of the time in town. Today there was a very long (but productive, hopefully) committee meeting after the rehearsal, but even after I'd sat through that, we still had time to go for a lovely cooling swim in the Commonwealth Games pool, followed by a leisurely meal - with a cocktail! - and we still had almost an hour to sit on a sofa in Starbucks and read. A lovely day :-)

The concert was good too. Of course it was much too hot, but never mind. The house was nearly full, and the audience seemed to have a great time. The soloists (Nuccia Focile and Paul Charles Clarke) were great - particularly in the comic duet from "L'elisir d'amore" - and Mark was in fine form. He introduced Paul Charles Clarke as "the great Welsh tenor". After he'd sung his first item, Mark said "As Paul has just reminded me, he is actually from Liverpool."

(This was much funnier at the time...)

All our bits went well. Oh, and in Brindisi, the soloists brought on glasses of champagne as usual, and brought an extra one for Mark, which they handed to him towards the end of the first verse. Very impressively, he conducted the whole of the second verse with this very full glass in one hand, and didn't spill a drop. In the third verse he started to drink it, sipping at first then chugging it down. He beat slower the more he drank, but as soon as he'd finished it he got faster and faster towards the end. A clever effect which was very entertaining :-)

"God, you sound good!"

Piano rehearsal for the opera gig tonight. So many classic quotes from Mark that I had a difficult time deciding which one to use for my title. But I decided that his delighted reaction to hearing the Fire Chorus had to be the winner. (It was great - he conducted it with a gradually broadening grin on his face, and by the end he was positively beaming!)

The rehearsal went pretty well. Not much scope for Jamieisms, as he only did the warmup, but there was "Lively tongues!" (said while rolling his tongue round the inside of his mouth... you had to be there...) and of course "Have you considered your eyelashes yet?"

Then Mark took over. He was on good form. Started with Carmen, and took it so fast that the first bit was over in seconds. Several of the slower members of the choir still hadn't found the page by the time the rest of us stopped singing. "Carmen!" said Mark to one of them. "You all right, darling? Have you got it?" Then he proceeded to sicken everyone by telling us about his recent visit to Spain, during which he attended some bullfights ("for research") which he described in graphic detail. And, about the soloists we've got for the gig: "They're a husband and wife team, you know. Don't know how often they've done this murder scene together..."

Carmen was followed by Brindisi. Not much to note here other than that "ah!" in this case is apparently translated not as a mere "ah!" but as "by God, yes, another bottle!"

Then there was a bit of confusion in the Scottish Refugees chorus because Mark decided he wanted it sung in a diametrically opposite style to the one he usually demands. No consonants, no bright vowels. Took a while to get used to that.

And finally, the Fire Chorus. This, again, was much faster than we'd rehearsed it, but went really well. (Jane and Gill both laughed out loud at me when I predicted it would work first time. Ha!) I was interested to learn that apparently the librettist invented quite a few words just because of the sound they make. Unfortunately Mark couldn't remember which words these are, but he assured us it's true. (He also did an impression of Verdi as an old man: "Leave me alone to do my vegetables!")

I seem to have scribbled down "Fire doesn't have barlines!" at one point... I'm pretty sure that's a Mark quote but I forget exactly what he meant by it :p But I was amused when, after a brief bit of polishing, Mark said: "The whole thing, David. And may the Force be with you."

I'm easily amused, mind you :p Anyway, because I'm obsessive by nature, I feel the need to post an mp3 of Brindisi, just for completeness. I'll be removing all four in a few days' time, so if you want them, grab them quick.

Brindisi (3.6 MB)