1983-1985 and varieties of Beethoven
The 1983/4 season started with a performance of the Verdi Requiem to open the Poole Proms. On the podium was the familiar face of Owain Arwel Hughes. He told us in rehearsal that it was his favourite piece of music, and in performance he didn't use a score. The main thing I remember about the concert was that the soprano soloist didn't seem too confident in places, and this showed particularly in a rather crucial passage, the Requiem section of the Libera Me. Afterwards Owain came and talked to some of us in the bar afterwards, and he said that there was a near disaster in that section, saying "I'm not blaming anyone, but the choir were magnificent". As it was just her and the choir, the orchestra being silent throughout the whole passage, it was clear who he was blaming.
There was no let up in the autumn as our next concert was Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. The Russian exile, Rudolf Barshai, had recently been appointed as the orchestra's principle conductor, and we were looking forward to our first experience under his baton. He was generally successful in conveying to us his interpretation, though his English was not very good.
It was somewhat of a change of mood in the spring when we performed what was one of the classics of choral music earlier in the 20th century but had gone out of fashion - Hiawatha's Wedding Feast by Coleridge-Taylor. It's a pleasant enough piece though it is rather anti-climactic toward the end. The conductor was Kenneth Alwyn who was trying to revive the work. After the concert we made a recording, which we were told was only the second one on LP. A few years ago the work was featured on Radio 3's Record Review. Our recording wasn't mentioned though another made not long after by the same conductor was.
We didn't have long after that to prepare for our next concert, which was the Dvorak Te Deum and This Worlde's Joie by William Mathias. The Dvorak is quite fun to sing, but the Mathias is rather boring for the basses, because for much of the time we were singing the same note.
The season finished with a strange concert, a performance of the Beethoven Missa Solemnis again, as part of a festival in Reading, with Adam Fischer conducting. We were looking forward to singing it again as we had put a lot of work into it earlier in the season. However a week or so before the concert, a member of the choir contacted a musical friend in Reading to ask him if he was planning to attend, only to be told he knew nothing about it. It transpired that the festival had been organised by the management of the Hexagon concert hall, which had recently changed hands, and the new owners had done little to promote the festival. So the hall was barely half full, and the conductor didn't seem interested. Geoff Hughes sang with the chorus as he was accustomed to do for away matches, and I stood next to him. At the end he turned to me and said "There was nothing there!", and I had to agree with him.
One of the controversial issues at the time was the future of the Winter Gardens Concert Hall in Bournemouth. The orchestra had moved their headquarters to the Wessex Hall in Poole, and the building was seen as a white elephant. Some on the council wanted to demolish it, and it had been unused for about a year. It was eventually decided to open it for a military band extravaganza to be held on three nights. Among all the marching and other displays the choir had various goodies to sing, such as Kwmbayah and the Hallelujah Chorus, and the evenings finished with a bang with a choral version of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture with all the special effects you would expect from the military. The text we had to sing was a transliteration of the words from a recording by the Red Army Choir by somebody who probably didn't speak Russian. Anyway it went down well, the only problem was that as the building had hardly been used for a year, the various explosions shifted quite a lot of accumulated dust.
Then in October there was a grand opening concert for the Bournemouth International Centre. This was meant to be a spectacular event, but to be honest it was one of the least enjoyable concerts I have taken part in. There were a hosts of stars, most noticeably Jose Carreras, and the BSO was conducted by Rudolf Barshai. The pieces we were required to sing were Handel's Zadok the Priest, quite a challenging work but very well known, and the Beethoven Choral Fantasy, very straightforward, apart from the words.
I think we spent half of two regular practices on the music which was sufficient to get us up to standard. We were then required to attend rehearsals on the Saturday morning and afternoon. On the Sunday we were scheduled again to have morning and afternoon rehearsals before the concert in the evening. As we were due to finish at 2.30, I thought that would give me plenty of time to go home and get changed before the concert. However we were told at the last minute that Jose Carreras wanted to rehearse at 2.00 to give him more time to rest his voice. When he had finished, we all took our place on the stage only for the orchestra to start playing something completely different. As the time went on, I was ready to walk off the stage as there was a danger that if I stayed for the end of the rehearsal I wouldn't have time to get back for the performance. Eventually they came to us just in time.
The concert was a rambling affair typical of such occasions, with bitty items, speeches and even a raffle. I went home in a bad mood, convinced that because we were the only people involved in the event who weren't being paid, we were treated as unimportant. A few months later we were performing the Bach B Minor Mass and that took up less of our time than this event had. After that concert I had gone into work the next day feeling I had had a most uplifting two days. This time I felt that I had wasted the weekend.
The Bach concert took place in March, and in May we performed another large scale work that was rather different, the Berlioz Grand Messe des Morts. It seemed a strange work to perform in a regular concert, though it may have been because it was the last concert in the season. It wasn't particularly memorable, apart from the fact that the conductor didn't bring the basses in in a crucial entry in the Dies Irae. We eventually came in a bar late, and caught up later on, but it could have been worse. I particularly remember the look on the conductor's face as he clearly had forgotten the choir were meant to be singing at that point.
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