Milton Abbey
It was in the spring of 1979 that I moved into my house at Stourpaine in Dorset, near Blandford Forum. The move had come about because I was working for a company called Minster Automation, which was based in Wimborne but had an office in Croydon. I had been employed from there but they decided to relocate me to Wimborne, which I was delighted about as I was fed up with living in Croydon.
At the time the move was being planned, I discovered that one of my Wimborne colleagues, Roy Comben, was a useful tenor and very much involved in the musical life of Dorset. He introduced me to the Dorset Bach Cantata Club, where I met Jack Collinge, who sang with the Bournemouth Municipal Choir, as it then was. He gave me contact details for the Choir's secretary, which is how I joined what became the Symphony Chorus.
It was early 1981 when I had a phone call from a lady who introduced herself as Brenda Pitfield. She was organising a choir for a festival that was to take place at Milton Abbey at the end of August, and she had heard that I was a bass. Would I be interested in singing the Monteverdi Vespers and Fauré Requiem? The choir would be directed by Michael James, the organist at Wimborne Minster. I replied that I would be delighted, and that I knew both pieces, which went down well. She explained that they were looking for a few more basses, and particularly tenors. In fact she had spread the word that she would not accept any more sopranos or altos unless they brought a tenor with them! She gave me details of the date and time of the first rehearsal which was to be in the Abbey itself.
The choir duly assembled as instructed, only to be told the devastating news that Michael James was terminally ill with cancer. Stephen Binnington, who was a local music teacher, had agreed to direct the Fauré, but did not feel up to taking on the Monteverdi. So there was no guarantee that we were going to be able to go ahead with that. However Brenda Pitfield would continue to look around for somebody to take on the direction.
In the meantime we were given more details about the festival. It was to take place over August Bank Holiday weekend. The Fauré would be on the Friday evening and the main concert, where it was hoped we would do the Monteverdi, would be in the Sunday evening. In addition there would be a chamber concert, an organ recital, and four services, for which a small choir would be needed. I had no hesitation in volunteering for that as I hadn't sung in such a choir since my time at Leicester Cathedral.
A few days later Brenda was given the contact details of Bernard Newman, a music teacher from Hampshire who had a cottage in Somerset. She called him and asked him if he would be prepared to direct a performance of Monteverdi Vespers, to which the answer was that there was nothing he would like to do more. So the festival could go ahead as planned.
There is a strong choral tradition in Dorset, with societies dotted around the county. At the time there existed the Dorset Guild of Singers to which many of these societies were affiliated. Once a year they would organise a concert in the Wessex Hall in Poole (now the Lighthouse) to perform a major choral work. Thus it was possible in this environment to assemble a choir with enough strong singers to be able to perform a work as complex as the Vespers.
Throughout the summer there was quite a heavy rehearsal schedule, particularly for those of us in what was called the Renaissance Choir. If I remember rightly we would get together on Thursday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Mostly we would meet in the Abbey itself, which was open to the public during the school holidays. Probably the majority of visitors would ignore us, though some would show an interest. On one occasion a group of teenagers came in, and while the rest explored the building, one girl sat watching us with great interest. Eventually her friends came back and she clearly got annoyed with them as they wanted to leave while she was not ready to go. Another time, a women stood right behind the conductor watching us, to all intents and purposes paying attention to our singing. However it turned out what she was really interested in was one of the plaques on the wall behind us, and at the first opportunity she asked if she could have a closer look.
Milton Abbey is a magnificent building with a superb acoustic. What is there was intended originally to be the nave of an even grander building, but most of us would settle for what we have now. The building is now the chapel of a public school, and the headmaster at the time was only too happy for the facilities to be used during the school holidays. It is in a splendid setting in the Dorset countryside and has been used on a number of occasions as a film set. The TV series "To serve them all my days" which had recently been shown had been shot there, and two years later they were shooting a film about Martin Luther while the festival was going on.
In early July Michael James passed away, so it seemed only appropriate to replace the concert in which the Fauré Requiem was to be performed with a Requiem Mass. The rest of the festival went ahead as planned, which seemed an appropriate way to remember Michael who had been the driving force behind the original idea.
Because there was so much happening in a few days, those who wished were allowed to stay overnight at the school, and catering facilities were made available. I took full advantage of this as did a dozen or so others, and it made for a very happy community. Throughout the time I was involved in the festival I have many happy memories of playing cards or consequences late into the night after concerts, or just putting the world to rights.
The Requiem Mass was the first event of the weekend on the Friday evening, and was a very moving occasion. The Abbey was full with friends and former colleagues of Michael James coming from far and wide, and I hope we did his memory justice with our performance of the Fauré. Stephen Binnington conducted, accompanied on the organ by Trevor Doar, the Abbey organist.
The Saturday was quite hectic. The Renaissance Choir sang another mass in the morning, with music mainly by Byrd. We had an afternoon off in theory, but most of the running of the festival was done by members of the choirs, and I ended up assisting with the lighting. In the evening Trevor Doar gave one of his legendary organ recitals, and then at 11pm we sang Compline. This was always a moving event, but with it being by candlelight in an otherwise darkened Abbey, it could be somewhat hairy. For a start finding your place to sit wasn't always easy particularly if the congregation arrived early. You then had to work out what you were going to sing, and when. Because of the amount of music in the festival as a whole, we might not have had much time to rehearse everything. I remember one tenor who had been busy with other things turning up at the last minute and found himself sight reading by candlelight when he wasn't standing next to anyone singing his part. He managed to survive the challenge.
On the Sunday we had a Parish Eucharist in the morning, then all afternoon was taken up with a rehearsal of the Monteverdi Vespers. Somehow it all came together, and the performance in the evening was well received. On the Monday the Renaissance Choir sang another mass, in the morning, this time to a setting by Palestrina, and in the afternoon the full choir sang Choral Evensong. The canticles were by Gibbons, and the anthem was Parry's I was glad, but we also sang Trevor Doar's Te Deum, a challenging but enjoyable piece.
It's now time to talk a bit more about Trevor. I was once asked who was the greatest musician I had ever seen. My answer was that I could not name any one particular, but Trevor was right among them. There are a number of extremely good musicians I have got to know quite well, but he was different to all of them. He had been an organ scholar at Cambridge and studied under, among others, Patrick Hadley. He was told he was good enough to be an international concert pianist, but he decided he didnt want to spend the rest of his life living out of a suitcase. So he went to Milton Abbey School as organist (and German teacher) and spent his entire career there. He bought a small holding nearby where he and his wife, Stella, kept goats.
Clearly the authorities at Milton Abbey realised what an asset they had, as they knew that if they allowed him to do what he wanted with the organ he would be happy. Consequently he had an arrangement with a local organ builder that he would provide whatever he wanted to enhance the instrument. So it was something special, and afficionados came from far and wide to hear what he could produce from it.
What made him different to my ears was that while the best interpreters would try to achieve the intentions of the composer, I got the feeling that it was as if he was composing the piece he was playing. He would ease himself into a piece - I have one recording of him playing a Bach prelude which starts off with an extended semi-quaver passage, and the first note is twice the length of subsequent ones. There are other idiosyncracies that might appear amateurish but not in his hands. He was also a phenomenal sight reader, and could not just play the notes but interpret fully complex pieces he had never seen before. One of his duties at the school was to play the organ at morning assembly. At the end he would play a voluntary, and he reckoned that his repertoire was big enough that he would be able to play a different piece every day for three years.
I took part in the Milton Abbey Festival every year till 1991. For several years I was on the committee, and for three years was chairman, though that was not as onerous a task as may appear. During that time the administrator was Frank Greenslade who did pretty well everything. Some time in the autumn we would have a committee meeting where we would agree a general outline of the festival, appoint a musical director for the year, and maybe agree what was to be performed at the main concert. Frank would then go ahead, booking the artists and making all the other arrangements. On one occasion about May or June time I asked if we needed a committee meeting, and he replied "What on earth for?".
Generally everything worked out fine in the end. The concerts went ahead as originally planned, the performers turned up on time and they (and hopefully the audiences) went away satisfied. One year things did not go quite smoothly, the main problem as I remember being that three different conductors were involved. They did not all get on well with each other and with the choir, and while all the concerts went off OK in the end, Frank Greenslade, in his review of the year, described it as the "summer of discontent". The following year was completely different; there were memorable concerts and a great spirit throughout the weekend. The only down side was that the weather was terrible, and Frank in his review called it the "winter of content".
The musical director would choose the music, sometimes being rather over-ambitious in the volume and complexity of what was to be performed. There were enough good singers in the Festival Choir and the Renaissance Choir for us to get our heads around the notes of the works we were singing, but we did not always have sufficient rehearsal time to give the quality of performance the conductor would have liked. I don't actually remember having to sight-read during a service, but on occasions we came pretty close.
I have programmes of all the festivals I took part in, and will describe the highlights and particular memories.
I have already mentioned a lot about 1981, and in 1982 Bernard Newman returned as Festival Director. He had a particular affection for the music of Poulenc, and on the Friday we sang his Mass in G as part of a Sung Eucharist. This is certainly a complicated piece, and I am not sure that we really did it justice, but it was satisfying to perform. The Saturday morning Eucharist in St Catherine's Chapel was mainly Palestrina, and Trevor Doar's organ recital included two substantial works: Liszt's Fantasia and Fugue on B.A.C.H. and Widor's 2nd Symphony. For the Sunday Eucharist the music was mainly by Britten, but for Evensong the canticles were Stainer. In the evening there was a very entertaining talk by Fritz Spiegel. On the Monday the music was all Victoria, a composer I didn't really know much about at the time, but who these days I really appreciate. Then in the afternoon it was rehearsals for the main concert in the evening when we performed Haydn's Harmoniemesse and the Brahms German Requiem (in English). After the concert there was supposed to be a buffet meal for the performers, but I was involved in clearing up and by the time I got to the dining room the food had nearly all gone, which I was not too pleased about. Apart from that it was a very enjoyable weekend.
In 1983 the Festival Director was Stephen Binnington who had ended up with more than he had bargained for two years earlier. Though not as experienced as Bernard Newman, he knew how to handle the choirs and was very popular. For the Friday evening Eucharist we sang the Vaughan Williams Mass in G Minor, which is quite challenging, with soloists from the choir. The Saturday morning Eucharist was to a setting by Tallis Missa Salve Intemerata, which unusually is for SATBB, which I particularly enjoyed. I was disappointed to miss Trevor Doar's organ recital as I was involved in setting up for a concert of music from the time of Pepys. Other composers featured at services over the weekend included Hassler, Croce, Gibbons and Weelkes, and the main choral concert on the Sunday evening consisted of Vivaldi's Magnificat, a Handel organ concerto and the Mozart Requiem.
In 1984 the festival was in the hands of two conductors and a chorus master. For the Friday Eucharist we sang the Kodaly Missa Brevis. This work requires three soprano soloists all comfortable in a high register, and fortunately we were blessed in that way in the chorus. In the main choral concert on the Sunday evening we sang Sancta Civitas by Vaughan Williams and the Rossini Stabat Mater. I do not have particularly happy memories of that concert. The conductor was someone well known in local musical circles, so he knew quite a few members of the chorus, and I felt from the start that he decided that we were rather limited and had not set his sights high. Also by this time I was in charge of the lighting. At one point in the Vaughan Williams the orchestral leader missed a rather crucial entry, which she blamed on poor lighting. The message came to us in the interval that if we did not improve things the orchestra would not come out for the second half. So it was panic stations and we rushed around rearranging things so that the orchestra had good vision and at the same time the spotlights were not shining directly into the faces of the audience. Not an ideal preparation for singing a major work! The second half passed off without any alarms, but it left a nasty taste.
The festival was not just about choral singing, and it was a tradition that on Saturday afternoon there was a recital given by young artists. This year there were three students from the Royal College of Music all of whom have had successful careers. Vanessa Hughes subsequently joined the violin section of BBC Symphony Orchestra, Mary Hughes (no relation) has been a distinguished piano teacher in London, while the third, Sarah Connolly, is one of the leading mezzo-sopranos of her generation, which has brought her a damehood.
1985 turned out very different. We had in Stephen Binnington and Richard Hall joint music directors who were familiar faces and understood what the festival is all about. For the Friday night Eucharist we sang the Bruckner Mass in E minor which is a great sing, though on the bass line we might have been enjoying it too much. I remember during one rehearsal one of the altos sitting in front of us saying how much they appreciated being near the basses, but did we have to sing quite so loud? But it was with Trevor Doar's organ recital on the Saturday evening that the weekend started to become special. One of Trevor's former pupils who went on to have a career as a sound engineer made a recording, and my cassette of the recital is a prized possession. From the first notes I felt that we were in for an evening of exceptional music making. He started with two Bach Preludes and Fugues, the second of them, known as "The Wedge", is quite well-known, but I have never heard anyone play it like he did. After Franck's Choral No 2 came Mushel's Toccata, a highly complex piece whose difficulties were no problem to Trevor. The mood then was much gentler with Jongen's Chant de May before he concluded with a real tour de force. Dupré's Symphonie Passion was new to me, but has fascinated me ever since. I have even bought a score, but there is no way I could ever play any of it. It started life, astonishingly, as improvisations on four hymn tunes, which he then went away and wrote down. The final movement, entitled "Resurrection", in my opinion, takes organ music to its highest level, and it was an absolute privilege to hear Trevor play it that evening.
But that was not the end of the musical entertainment for the evening. We could now go and hear Antony Hopkins "Talking About Music". Those of us of a certain age might remember the half hour talks he used to give on the radio with this title. In them he would describe pieces of music in some depth, but in a way that was easy to follow. Here he was in person talking about how Beethoven sonatas would have sounded to the original listeners. He was as knowledgable as ever but also extremely amusing.
I also have a recording of the Sunday evening concert. The choir sang the Bach Magnificat and Haydn's Maria Zeller Mass and clearly enjoyed themselves. Between them came a performance of the Poulenc Concerto for Organ Strings and Timpani. I know what I am going to say will sound arrogant or patronising, but I will say it anyway. I have often been fortunate enough to sing with soloists of the highest quality, and the choirs I have been performing with have risen to the challenge of singing to match that quality. In addition, with Bournemouth Symphony Chorus we have performed choral works in the second half of a concert in which the first part has included a concerto played by a distinguished soloist. So the audience has had, for example, Nigel Kennedy or Julian Lloyd Webber in the first half and us after the interval, and I have felt we have always justified our place on the platform. On this occasion I felt we could not be expected to match the musicianship being displayed by Trevor and just had to do our best. The Poulenc is a real tour de force, and he just played it seemingly without any effort, able to get the most out of the music without worrying about its technical difficulties. The orchestra was a scratch one of local players, but as several of them were members of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra or Sinfonietta the quality was high. I particularly remember watching Stephen Binnington conducting, keeping everything perfectly under control but still looking rather overawed by the occasion. Definitely a special evening.
Here are Mike Payne's Musings on the 1985 Fewtival. Mike was a tenor in the Festival and Renaissance Choirs.
In 1986 Colin Howard did most of the musical direction, but Geoffrey Hughes, who I knew well as chorus master of Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, conducted the main concert on the Sunday evening where we performed Dvorak's Te Deum and the Duruflé Requiem. Friday night was challenging with Stravinsky's Mass performed liturgically. I had a short solo to sing which I thought I was prepared for, when a censer appeared and at my side and I breathed in a lungful of incense.
In 1987 Richard Hall, well-known in local musical circles, was chorus director, assisted by Andrew Richardson. Richard was always on the look-out for unjustly neglected British music, and introduced us to Stanford's Stabat Mater for the Sunday night concert which I got to like eventually.
Stephen Binnington made a welcome return in 1988, and again Andrew Richardson was involved. It took about 5 minutes for the committee to choose, and Stephen to agree to, the work for the main concert - Monteverdi Vespers again. Whether we did it justice or not is questionable, as there are plenty of tricky parts to it, but the choir certainly enjoyed doing it. Trevor, as usual, excelled himself with the Saturday organ recital, but one piece stood out - Herr Jesus hat ein Gärtchen by Flor Peeters.
For three years I had been chairman of the organising committee, which as explained earlier was not as onerous a job as it sounded. Frank Greenslade did all the arranging, and during the festival itself I often felt that my main task was, as an audience member, to start the applause when appropriate since people weren't always sure whether to clap in a religious building. Now I was working away from home a lot and could not attend as many rehearsals as I would like to have done, so Mike Payne took over. He also took on very successfully some of the choral direction, supporting Andrew Richardson. For the Sunday evening concert we performed a rather less challenging but equally enjoyable work - Haydn's Creation.
In 1989, for a third year, Andrew Richardson was one of the conductors involved, assisted by Mike Payne. Mike made his debut as a conductor in the subdued lighting of compline on the Friday night, and the next morning he led the Festival Chorus in a Sung Eucharist that included Mozart's Coronation Mass. The Sunday Evening Concert was a performance of a slightly more straightforward masterpiece - Haydn's Creation.
There was a debut of a different kind in the Friday night concert. It included two choral works - Monteverdi's Beatus Vir and Dvorak's Mass in D - and in between Trevor Doar played Rheinberger's Organ Sonata in D Flat. The key was significant because that was the pitch of the 32 foot stop that Trevor had persuaded the school authorities to purchase.
In 1990 I started a new job in Swindon. This involved a one and a half to two hour commute every day in each direction, as it took more than two years to sell my house. I took part in the 1990 and 1991 festivals, but my rehearsal attendance was patchy, and some of the music I was supposed to have sung, I can hardly remember. I was unaware, until I looked in the 1990 programme, that I had sung Liszt's Missa Choralis, but I do have a vague recollection of Gounod's Messe Sollenelle St Cecilia that we also sang in the Friday night concert. But I was unlikely to forget the Brahms German Requiem that we performed on the Sunday night. In 1991 we sang Vaughan Williams' Pilgrim's Journey, that was adapted from his stage work "Pilgrim's Progress", which was exciting, though a bit nerve-racking at times. It was quite a challenging weekend as the Sunday concert was a perfomance of Handel's oratorio Samson.
That was the last festival I took part in, though a year or two later I turned up to attend a service and discovered they were short of basses, so because I knew the music I ended up singing. However I need to mention "Voces Intimae". This was a small group of singers selected and led by Trevor Doar. I always thought the name was a bit pretentious, but I didn't like to say so.
Though we did do regular concerts, we were really doing it for our own pleasure. We would hire copies of music that Trevor felt we should try out, but if it turned out to be too difficult we would go back to our regular repertoire, which was usually the Vivaldi Gloria and Mozart's Solemn Vespers.
As I said earlier, Trevor was a brilliant keyboard player and an inspirational person, but not a natural choirmaster - he never got involved with the Festival Chorus. However that did not matter to us. He had plenty of anecdotes about his own musical journey, and also about different composers and musicians. On one occasion we were rehearsing a Mozart mass and having difficulty with a particular passage. Trevor explained that Mozart had got lost at that point so the chords were a bit confusing, but he then repeated the passage to give the impression that he knew what he was doing! He would probably not claim that he was Mozart's standard, but he clearly understood the compositional process. I'm not sure whether he ever had anything published, but those of us who ever performed his compositions had the utmost respect for him as a composer.
Different members came and went, but the core of the choir were sopranos Jean Gould, Liz Greenslade, Jill Minchin and Pat Tribe, altos Amy Guppy and Gill Howell, tenors Frank Greenslade and Martin Wright, and basses Chris Farmer, John Warren and myself. We would perform in local churches as well as Milton Abbey and would rehearse in the school. We would be in particular demand at Christmas. In other parts of my writings I have been able to refer back to concert programmes as an aide memoire, but I have not kept any as they were normally single sheets of paper that were not worth retaining, so I just need to mention a few concerts that were particularly memorable.
One particular performance I remember was in a small village church in front of about 25 people. On this occasion we were quite ambitious and included Poulenc's Gloria. We probably made a reasonable fist of it, but we could tell it wasn't quite what the audience were expecting. Our final piece was Mendelssohn's Hear My Prayer, and when our star soprano, Jean Gould, started "Oh for the wings of a dove" we could clearly feel the audience relaxing as if to say that here at last was something we could enjoy.