How to make and recover from mistakes
The conductor Brian Wright once told about the time he was singing at the Royal Festival Hall and came in with a fortissimo top G one bar early. That, he said, was one of the proudest moments of his career.
This might seem a strange thing to say, but competent choral singers need to have the confidence to make entries at the correct time. If a choir includes people who wait for somebody else to come in before they start (the Mantovani effect), the result can be underwhelming. You have to be prepared to get it wrong, and hope that is restricted to rehearsals.
I can't claim as notable an achievement as Brian's; my best was live on Radio 3. I blame George Gershwin. In the song "I can't sit down" from Porgy and Bess the same basic tune appears in two verses, but at one point, while there is a one bar rest in the second verse, there is a two bar rest in the first. I must have been too busy looking at the conductor and came in too soon. The people around me noticed, but when I listened to the recording, there was nothing too obvious.
In a recent recording session, we were on about the fifth take of a very tricky passage that was soft and unaccompanied with a tendency to go flat. I started to come in a beat early, and although I stopped as soon as I could, it was too late. At the end of the take the recording director appeared and announced that that was fine. The conductor pointed out that someone had come in early, to which he replied "I know, but we can get rid of it". We're not always so lucky.
I have never been in a live performance that has broken down completely, but there have been one or two close shaves. A few years ago I took part in a performance of Mozart's Mass in C Minor. During the "Benedictus" one of the soloists came in early and the others followed suit. The conductor realised there was nothing he could do but carry on beating time and hope for the best, so it continued with the soloists a bar ahead of the orchestra. At the end of their passage there is about 8 bars of orchestra before the choir comes in, the sopranos first then the other voices. The orchestra still generally seemed to be together but it was not clear. I knew we had to make a confident entry and hopefully the choir members would be coordinated. Luckily at what I assumed was the correct place enough of the sopranos came in confidently and we were soon all together. As has been said more than once, as long as everyone finishes together the audience will be happy. I'm not sure how many people noticed what went wrong, but my mother certainly worked out that it was not meant to be that way.
We could have been heading for disaster once during a performance of the Berlioz Requiem. At one point in the Dies Irae after the "Tuba Mirum" section there is a strong brass chord held over two bars with the basses coming in with "Liber Scriptus" in the second bar. However the conductor seemed to have forgotten about our entry as he was motionless throughout both bars; so not surprisingly we didn't do anything until a bar later when he brought the trumpets in. I will never forget the look of panic on his face when a sound that he wasn't expecting hit him. We sang the whole phrase a bar behind the orchestra, after which there were several instrumental bars. Our next entry was in the correct place and everything was fine after that. I'm not sure how many even in the choir realised we had gone wrong.
All conductors (and most singers) will be aware going into a piece of music which the tricky bits are, and where they have to be particularly vigilant; but it is sometimes the less obvious passages where a lapse of concentration can present problems. I have been involved in close shaves in the "Domine Jesu Christe" in the Mozart Requiem under two different conductors, when the choir were not clear whether the beat was in crotchets or minims. In both cases it needed a few strong singers to hold their line to bring the choir back together again.
Complete breakdowns have been known to happen with church choirs. In Malmesbury Abbey a few years ago, the choir came to an unscheduled halt in the middle of an Amen. This caused so much embarrassment that when we now sing that particular anthem we often omit the Amen. I have been singing in the choir for a quarter of a century, and this happened before I joined, but the memory of it is still raw!