1987-89 and a new Chorus Master
In 1987 I sang for the first time two works that I have developed a particular fondness for - Mozart's Mass in C Minor and Vaughan Williams's Sea Symphony. This was also the final season for Geoffrey Hughes who had decided to retire as chorus master. The committee advertised for a replacement and apparently about fifty people applied. This was reduced to a short list of seven, who were invited to take part of a rehearsal, so that the members of the Chorus could be involved in the decision. These were split across three weeks.
First up were Nigel Perrin, well-known as a former Kings Singer, who I was later to get to know well, and Colin Howard, who I had already worked with in the Milton Abbey Festival. Both made a good impression and were still in the reckoning. I can't remember who the candidates were at the second rehearsal, maybe for a good reason. The final session started with Neville Creed, followed by Christopher Dowie, already familiar to the choir as he was Geoff Hughes' deputy. Finally came Stephen Jackson, the youngest of those on the short list, who not long after became chorus master of the BBC Symphony Chorus. We were asked to nominate our preferences, and Neville Creed was the overwhelming favourite. So the committee took that into account and decided to appoint him.
Our first concert under his leadership was a performance of Verdi highlights as part of the Poole Proms, which was not too challenging for the chorus or him. However he then faced a tougher challenge. We were due to perform Belshazzar's Feast under the baton of Roger Norrington. It was normally the case that the conductor would attend a single rehearsal with the choir alone a week or so before the concert, when we would be expected to be up to performance standard. However he chose to come about three weeks earlier than usual, when there was still much work to be done. That day I had been working in London and was held up by traffic, so I arrived about half an hour late. I was surprised to see Neville taking the rehearsal with Roger Norrington sitting to the side watching everything he did but not saying a word. It turned out that he had decided after listening to the choir for about a quarter of an hour that we were not good enough. At the end he said that he would only allow us to sing in the concert if we scheduled at least one extra rehearsal. He also said that because the men had got flat in the opening unaccompanied section, we would have to have the French horns backing us to keep us in pitch. The problem with that was that when we were singing loudly we wouldn't be able to hear the horns to tell if we were going flat, which would make it worse.
Neville must have thought that his job was on the line for this to happen in his first major concert, but he managed to bring us up to an acceptable standard. I can't remember Roger Norrington showering us with praise afterwards, but it seemed to go alright, and I don't think we went too flat in the crucial opening passage.
The following March the chorus and orchestra gave the world premiere of the First Symphony of Alexander Lokshin. He was a Russian composer who was out of favour in the Soviet Union, but whose music was championed by Rudolf Barshai. It included a setting of parts of the Requiem, and was a good enough sing without being memorable. Sadly the composer died a few months before the concert took place. However this did not stop Barshai continuing to advocate his music, and according to Wikipedia he conducted a performance of this piece in 2002 that was an important step to Lokshin's posthumous rehabilitation.
Coming up next was a real challenge - Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe. I still consider this to be among the most difficult music I have ever sung. The chorus is entirely wordless (which at least removes one complication). After a later performance I heard a member of the audience saying that it must be boring for the singers. I wanted to say that on the contrary it is a fascinating piece to sing, once you get to know it, because you feel as though you really are part of the orchestra. The problem is that when an orchestral player sees an A on the score in front of him, he can find an A at once. Ravel did not seem to realise that for singers it was rather more complicated, and left us high and dry several times. The worst occasion is where the strings play a series of Ravelian chords getting higher and higher and softer and softer before fading away. Divided tenors and basses then come in on a chord of A minor completely unaccompanied and sing a phrase with rather tricky harmonies. The sopranos sing a rocking phrase on off-beats, and a few bars later the men return on the on-beat. Eventually a solo trumpet enters with a not particularly helpful interjection, but at least we get a clue about what pitch we are meant to be singing.
The concert was part of the Bath Festival, though it took place in the Colston Hall in Bristol. We never really got on top of the tricky passages, but at least we got through to the end without any calamities, which was probably as good as we hoped for. My mother had come to stay so that she could attend the concert. While we were rehearsing in the afternoon, she went for a walk and discovered Bristol Choral Society rehearsing The Dream of Gerontius in St Mary Redcliffe. Very loyally she declined the opportunity to attend the performance, but they probably had a much bigger audience than we did.
Some pieces keep on coming round, and the 1988 Poole Proms opened with Carmina Burana, again conducted by Owain Arwel Hughes. Later that year we performed Rachmaninov's The Bells. This was a composer that till then I had never really taken to, but I did enjoy singing it. It was quite tricky in parts, even though we were singing in English. In fact I think this was the piece that persuaded me I needed to use reading glasses when I was singing. Being long-sighted I was holding my music further and further away, and in parts of this work the words were coming thick and fast and I was having great difficulty keeping up. As for Rachmaninov, I had probably considered his music heading down a dead-end of romanticism, but I realised from The Bells that it was rather more original than that. When I hear particularly the orchestral introduction to the third movement, it comes over more as a precursor to minimalism.
The following spring there was a re-acquaintance with The Dream of Gerontius. In spite of my reservations after our previous performance, I did look forward to this, particularly as the mezzo was Janet Baker. The conductor was Owain Arwel Hughes, not the person necessarily associated with this kind of music, but it was still a memorable performance.
That summer we were lucky enough to perform Mahler's 2nd Symphony in two special venues - Exeter Cathedral and Winchester Cathedral. I particularly enjoyed the Exeter acoustic, but there was one problem. There was an ancient clock which chimed every quarter hour, and there was no way to stop it. I was dreading it coming in in the pause before our first entry as it could well have thrown us. As it approached I was checking my watch and panicking more and more. In the end we beat it by about ten seconds.
As I wrote earlier, I moved in 1979 to Dorset as the company I worked for wanted me to be based in their head office in Wimborne. However I was made redundant in 1982, and rather than move I chose to do contract work and try to run my own business providing off-site computer services. But this did not work out, so in late 1989 I started looking for permanent work. That December we performed Bach's Christmas Oratorio (or as much of it as would fit into an evening concert). I remember that on the morning of the concert I had sent off a job application to a company in Warrington saying that I would be prepared to relocate, and during the evening I was thinking that I must be mad. Here I am singing my favourite music in a top choir under the baton of such a fine conductor as Richard Hickox. How could I give all that up? Then reality intervened, and a few days later when I was offered a job in Swindon I decided to accept it, starting at the beginning of January.
Go to Next Page