Berberis' World

Friday, 25th December, 2015.

I left Dr Parker’s consulting room in 2004 with a ‘prescription’ for a course of acapella singing. It was part of an NHS initiative (then) that sent people to places other than home to do something other than just take antidepressants.

If someone had told me that, 11 years later, I’d be part of a group who’d beat everyone else to have the Christmas No 1, I’d’ve told them they were mad.

But that’s what happened.

It’s a funny old world.

Saturday, 14th November 2015, Goldsmith’s College.

“On the evening of 13 November 2015, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks occurred in Paris, the capital of France, and its northern suburb, Saint-Denis. Beginning at 21:20 CET, three suicide bombers struck near the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, followed by suicide bombings and mass shootings at cafés, restaurants, and a concert hall in Paris. The attackers killed 130 people, including 89 at the Bataclan theatre, where they took hostages before engaging in a stand-off with police. There were 368 people who were wounded, 80-99 seriously so. Seven of the attackers also died, while authorities continued to search for accomplices. The attacks were the deadliest on France since World War II, and the deadliest in the European Union since the Madrid train bombings in 2004. France had been on high alert since the January 2015 attacks in Paris that killed 17 people, including civilians and police officers.” (Taken from Wikipedia, Sunday 27th December.)

This left all of us shocked, angry, and saddened. The mood was subdued at rehearsal and it was decided to dedicate the concert to those killed, for the little good it would do.

But what do you do? Send money, I suppose, and clothes. Maybe food. Moral support. Once you’ve done this, all that is really left is to be bloody thankful that it wasn’t you or your loved ones. Because, for most of us, the fact that there are people in the world who think it’s acceptable to kill anyone who doesn’t agree with them is as incomprehensible as it is terrifying.

Sadly, there always have been and there always will be those who are so ignorant, so gullible, or so bitter and twisted, that wholesale slaughter of dis- or un-believers is not only acceptable but justified by the religious tract to which they slavishly adhere.

And it is religion at the heart of all of this. Evangelicals of all stripes pick and choose what they like from their chosen book, but endorsements for the most extreme behaviour lurks in the pages of all of them. Some of the most ardent churchgoers I’ve known were guilty of half a dozen of the so-called crimes for which the Christian Bible mandates the death penalty.

Once it was sticks and stones. Now it’s Semtex, suicide bombers, high velocity rifles, planes into buildings, and more, all coordinated through social media. Popular newspapers tell us that we need to be suspicious of anyone who’s different. Those in the silent majority (and I don’t mean frothing-at-the-mouth right/left wing idiots who get more than enough air time/column inches) need to remind themselves and educate the next generation that “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” leaves the world toothless and blind.

As for the concert, it went well. The audience was large, and generous with their applause. For a couple of hours, in a hall in New Cross – far from the carnage in Paris – a small group of people cooperated with a single purpose, and produced something beautiful.

Saturday, 4th July 2015, Cadogan Hall, London.

John Joubert: O Lorde, the maker of al thing
Eric Whitacre: Five Hebrew Love Songs
Mozart: Sonata in A for piano and violin
Carl Orff: Carmina Burana

Soprano: Louise Kemény
Countertenor: Tim Travers-Brown
Baritone: Alex Ashworth
Percussion Leader: Matthew Turner
Violin: Paula Muldoon
Pianos: Nico de Villers, Jakob Fichert

Sydenham High School Voices
Director: Caroline Lenton-Ward

Conductor: Dan Ludford-Ward

The Joubert was new to me. It came first out of 235 entries in the 1952 Novello Anthem Competition, and was described at the time as a ‘fine piece, dignified and ecclesiastical in style’. I thought it was fine until the ‘in heav’n and yearth’, when you really couldn’t hear anything except the sopranos.

The NAC runner up (My soul there is a country by John Graves) was described as ‘charming and effective […] well-suited for the averagely good choir and organ’. However, its success seems to have been eclipsed by a piece of the same name by the much more famous Charles Hubert Parry. Some of the entries were criticised as being too modern – ‘modulating too freely and unconvincingly’ – but, according to some, this may have been a result of Novello tending towards a more conservative style in an attempt to sell more music scores. I mention this only because goodness only knows what the judges – W. H. Harris and E. Thirman – would have made of some of the pieces by Rutter, McDowell, or Patterson, that we’ve performed recently.

Anything by Eric Whitacre is always welcome. The Five Hebrew Love Songs were no exception.

I’ve sung Carmina Burana several times, either extracts or the whole thing. In November 2005 with the LCS, in November 2009 and October 2010 with the LPC, and again with the Really Big Chorus. There are a few things I expect from a performance: the timpani should sound like thunder, the tenor should completely ham it up, soprano should be able to hit that stratospherically high D, and my voice should last to the end. To date, I’ve not been disappointed.

Tuesday, 10th March 2015, Royal Festival Hall.

LCS joined forces with the Hackney Singers to amass a 300+ voice choir for this concert. Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ is well-known and much-loved. I’ve sung it on a number of occasions and, until now, there have been two sections which I’d not yet mastered, despite innumerable rehearsals: the two ‘Osanna‘s. I’ve always had to mime my way through all but the first and last bars. This time, I knew the notes, I could count to three, and I was note perfect.

Well, almost.

The common cold. A virus gets left on an easily accessible surface by a selfish git, gets picked up, mutates, gets passed on, gets left on an easily accessible surface etc., etc., ad infinitum. I usually manage avoid them before a concert. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of viruses recently and one of them got lucky. At the rehearsal on the day of the concert, I involuntarily blurted out some really bum notes, and it was only by concentrating on proper breath support that I didn’t do the same in the performance.

Brahms, then. ‘Nänie’. It’s a short piece, and very reminiscent of parts of his ‘Deutsches Requiem’.

The Wikipedia entry starts thus:

Singing in an internationally known venue always ups your game. You definitely reap what you sow and there’s no doubt that the collaboration with the Hackney Singers (a very friendly bunch) made a big difference to both choirs. The audience was amazing – as many if not more as the LPC managed to draw – and very appreciative. All in all, a wonderful evening.

Sunday, 1st March, 2015.

It’s exactly three years since the email arrived telling me I’d been chosen for the Lewisham Hospital choir. Along with three others workplace choirs, our progress – from nervous auditions in front of a couple of dozen people to confident performers on stage in front of thousands – would be filmed for 20/20’s ‘Sing While You Work’ series to be broadcast later in the year.

It came at the right time; I was over the trauma of being kicked out of the LPC, but still had no confidence in my singing ability. Now, at last, someone did. Whatever the agenda – and I’m in no doubt that they had an agenda – it was an opportunity to prove myself to myself.

At the start, there were 29 of us. We had one fewer bass than the three other choirs – partly a result of there being more women than men working in the Trust – and the soprano section had its mandatory divas. There were a few people with whom I hit it off straight away, and they know who they are. There were also a few with whom I was never going to hit it off. I don’t care if they know who they are.

The first time we all got together was in the Lessof, from which we piled into a bus and were taken to Greenwich. Here, we were put on a boat, plied with drink and taken up river. It was already obvious that there were cliques; doctors with doctors, physios with physios, porters with porters, etc. This didn’t help my mood, which had already dipped with my belief that most of the other women in the choir had better voices than I did.

[This turned out to not be true. However, when a respected choir master tells you that you can’t sing, you are inclined to believe them above someone off the telly.]

Still, back on the boat, and we were – at one point – motoring under London Bridge singing ‘London’s Burning’ as a round. I found out that two of the sopranos had, like me, been members of the LPC, although not at the same time. One of the altos had been in a punk band, one of the tenors had been in an orchestra, and one of the basses was in a barbershop quartet.

Rehearsals were usually filmed, and the oft-repeated instruction to ‘ignore the cameras’ was actually quite easy to do. The few who kept complaining about the presence of a film crew were usually reminded that they’d not been forced to audition so, for the sake of everyone else, please shut up.

To begin with, the songs were simple. I’m used to learning difficult pieces in a short time and it did get a bit frustrating when we were progressing at one bar a minute. It’s like being behind a learner driver when you’re in a hurry to get somewhere; you have to remind yourself that you were also once a beginner.

When we were told we had to dance as well as sing, I was less than enthusiastic. I’d attended a couple of sessions with the Rock Choir in Blackheath and dance ‘moves’ were (pardon the pun) routine with them. Happy to dance. Happy to sing. Not happy to do both at the same time, and even less happy when we were told we had to work out the routine ourselves. At this point, the choir members who liked the sound of their own voices took charge and it became something of a battle of wills. My contribution was mainly to say what I wouldn’t do. I’ll admit that this wasn’t as helpful as suggesting what I would, and there was much flouncing and drama and tantrums. The end result was acceptable. It got us through to the final, anyway.

The semi-final was at the Colston Hall in Bristol. I’d been there twice – once on stage, playing the recorder, and once in the audience at a Gerry Rafferty concert – so going back to sing on stage, even if it was to a silent audience, was pretty special, even though it’s embarrassing to now remember just how often I mentioned this fact. There’s a huge extension, with public areas, office space, rehearsal rooms, and bars, but the old Hall didn’t look much different to how I remembered. Smaller, obviously. Much of the journey there was spent rehearsing the song we were going to sing (before the film crew told us to stop) or warming up. When we weren’t doing this, I’m sure some of us thought about what they’d say or do when we got back, having not made it through to the final.

The journey back was spent drinking and singing as we celebrated the fact that we had.

The day of the final started with an accident.

The coach which was meant to take us to Llangollen was involved in one even before it got to us, and some people saw that as a good omen. It was raining, which was less an omen than a pain in the arse. Pete announced that we would be going by train and we were taken by taxi to Euston to board the 11.15am to Crewe. We even managed to get a 1st class carriage, probably to the irritation of the people who’d paid to be there. We were pretty well-behaved; the table behind me started a discussion about sex (doctors, most of them) and I used the time and the space to let out the seams of my dress.

Once at Crewe, we were taken by taxi to Llangollen. The weather as we got into Wales was nice and warm, and we started to think that it might last. It didn’t. We’d only been there about half an hour and it started drizzling – within the hour, the ground was soaked and the mud was oozing through whatever it was they’d put on the grass to protect it. Those who hadn’t brought wellies with them bought them pretty quickly.

There then began the seemingly endless process of being dragged here and there and back again to simply stand around. We’d been told we’d have a run through and 2 sound checks. What we found out at the very last minute was that the riser we had to stand on to perform was narrow and very unstable. This meant that the routine we’d rehearsed over and over for the final song was far too “big” for the area available. I don’t know whether this led to the feelings of having been stitched up, and the subsequent below-par performance, but it didn’t help.

It was whilst waiting in the wings to go on for the sound-check that my suspicions that the whole thing WAS a fix became conviction. RM sang ‘Don’t Stop’ by Fleetwood Mac, we sang ‘For Once In My Life’ by Stevie Wonder, and STW sang ‘Feeling Good’. Listen to all three, imagine having to dance to them on a postage stamp and you’ll get the idea.

There was more waiting around, and we were now getting very tired (we’d travelled further than anyone else) and hungry (the only things provided were massively carb-heavy) and the novelty of wading through mud was wearing thin. Eventually, the time for the performance came around and we traipsed off through the mud again to the pavilion. The three choirs all had their Hakka moments, and ours was this:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

“Citizenship in a Republic”: Theodore Roosevelt at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Eddie finished by saying that it had been read at the funerals of the men with whom he’d served, and it would be read at his own. Suzanne cried, and I shed a few tears as well.

RM were first on, with STW second and us third. It was even more obvious this time that STW were going to win, but we went on smiling and gave it our all.

This was at about 8.15pm. We then got a proper meal, and some of us (RM as well) found the beer tent and had a pint, until we were summoned back to the catering tent to wait around again.

It was whilst wandering around this tent that I found, on a table, what looked like a running order for the crew. If it had been left there accidentally they were extremely lucky that no-one else but me appeared to have read it. If it was deliberate, then shame on them. What it said was that, after the whole thing wrapped, STW were to be taken to a different hotel to us and RM.

This was final, and incontrovertible, proof that the whole thing had been fixed, and probably from the outset. When we were finally shepherded onto the stage again at the time of the judges’ announcement – at gone 1am – it was obvious to me that STW were going to win.

I’ll be frank. RM had far more than its fair share of plain people. We had our fair share of plain people. STW had far less than its fair share of plain people. Their line-up included half a dozen tall, pretty, busty young women, who are clearly going to look better on TV.

This and the separate hotel were not the only clues. It turned out that GM had spent the week leading up to the final with them, and a lot of this with their soloist. It showed. With better looking people, better coaching, and a better song, the outcome would very likely have been decided as soon as the auditions were over.

A number of our number were very upset. I was surprised to realise that I wasn’t one of them. Being almost certain that it was a set-up actually softened the blow to the point of it hardly registering at all. This was helped by the copious amount of alcohol that was consumed in the bar of the Wrexham Ramada hotel, where the staff were extremely tolerant, and the RM were hugely supportive and very (in some cases, too) friendly.

The resulting hangover lasted about 48 hours.

Despite all of the little niggles, problems, and outright annoyances, I’m pleased I took part, but I’d think twice about doing anything like it again.