Berberis' World

Wednesday, 12 February 2025, Royal Festival Hall.

The reason that this work keeps recurring is that – despite being a Requiem – it has no overtly religious overtones. For someone who went from regular churchgoer to atheist in just a few months, a question I have very occasionally been asked is ‘how can you sing religious stuff if you don’t believe in god?’

My response is usually: how can you claim to believe in god and yet not follow the basic tenet of any religon – do as you would be done by?

Hubby – who rarely attends concerts – attended this one, and was as impressed as he usually is.

Thursday, 13th April 2023, Royal Festival Hall.

Nearly a decade since last singing it with Lewisham Choral Society, we were joined for this performance of Verdi’s Requiem the Hackney Singers. The Festival Hall is one of my favourite venues, and this evening it was packed. There were more people in the audience than for probably any other concert I’ve been part of.

There may be very little else for me to say about this work. If the different shade of yellow highlighter is anything to go by, there were some minor changes this time round: all Altos join the Tenors for the 2 bars immediately after Figures 9 and 94; Choir 1 and 2 join forces from 7 bars after Fig. 78 to Fig. 79. Any excuse to sing more Verdi is fine with me.

The programme has some interesting Guiseppe gossip: Wagner – perhaps following the old adage of “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”, or because his opinion was thought irrelevant – declined to say what he thought about the Requiem, whilst both Brahms and George Bernard Shaw respectively declared it the work of a “genius”, and an “imperishable monument”: their agreement about at least one requiem mass in all probability being of absolutely no note whatsoever.

Tuesday 9 April 2024, The Adelphi Theatre, Strand.

This was an Adam Blanshay Production in collaboration with NHS Charities Together to raise funds “for 230 charities up and down the country”. There are too many people to credit, so I won’t try.

Earplugs.

Earplugs are essential if you are performing with anyone playing instruments that are plugged in. I fear that I was out of tune for far more of this concert than I had hoped. We’d been given sheet music for the songs we were joining in with, but all the note-bashing on the Tuesday evenings leading up to the gig was for nought as cuts were made on the day, far too late to actually memorise anything different.

However, no-one goes onto the stage at the Adelphi trying to conceal bits of A4 behind the singer in the row in front, so we all just got on with it as best we could (some much better than others).

The songs were ‘500 Miles’ (not the Proclaimers version, which would have been much easier), ‘From Now On’ (from ‘The Greatest Showman’, which I saw on the small screen), and ‘You Will Be Found’ (from ‘Dear Evan Hansen’, with which I was previously unfamiliar, but which has a phenomenal drum accompaniment).

This is being written nearly two and half years after the event. I can find 9 photos from this evening, none of which convey anything much except that the predominant set colour was NHS blue.

Saturday, 16th March 2024, Blackheath Halls.

Ralph Vaughan Williams – Five Mystical Songs

Francis Poulenc – Piano Concerto in C# minor / Stabat Mater

Conductor: Dan Ludford-Thomas

Piano: Nico de Villiers

Forest Philharmonic Orchestra

Baritone: Daniel Tate

Soprano: Helen Meyerhoff

Piano: Cliodna Shanahan

This term’s major work for Lewisham Choral Society was Poulenc’s Stabat Mater, something I appear to have performed almost exactly 13 years ago with the London Philharmonic. I don’t remember that earlier performance, although I do recall the rehearsals, during which a fellow alto – Stephanie – and I doodled on our scores and wrote comments on how awful the text was.

However, unless Poulenc wrote two Stabat Mater‘s this wasn’t the same work. I don’t have the score from when I was in the LPC so can’t be absolutely sure, but a quick peek at the post from back then has a quote from a review that mentions a Pavan, which wasn’t in this score. The review refers to the piece as having something “sensually Caravaggian about its pained chromaticism…“

Pained is certainly a word one could use.

The other work was Five Mystical Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams, words by George Herbert.

Song 1 is Easter, and contains the phrase “The cross taught all wood to resound his name who bore the same/His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key is best to celebrate the most high day.” Apart from the ridiculous Tolkienian notion that trees communicate with each other even after they’ve been felled and fashioned into an instrument of torture, comparing the tuning of a lute’s strings to stretching a human being’s sinews to tearing point is just horrible.

Song 2 is the quaintly titled I got me flowers. I prefer Blur’s version.

Song 3, Love bade me welcome, is a dinner invitation. I’d put good money on the fact that no-one has ever invited anyone to dinner with the words “You must sit down […] and taste my meat”.

The choir stay silent during Song 4, The Call. Following on from Song 3, this call should be to the police.

Song 5 is one song – Let all the world in every corner sing – to the tune of another (and not one that I’ve heard before). However, after the other 3 it’s quite cleansing. The altos end on a high D, surpassed only by the E in Easter.

The final rehearsal is in situ with the orchestra. The RVW was as expected: I hadn’t practised anywhere near enough, and it showed. The Poulenc was slightly better, but I finally decided to mark off several bars where – even with considerably more practise – I still couldn’t pitch the notes. Thankfully, there were more than enough altos who knew what they were doing but miming isn’t what I plan to do during a concert. Where I was confident, I sang up. It was a pleasant surprise to end the rehearsal feeling slightly better disposed to Frankie Plank and his pained chromaticism.

For the concert, the Five Mystical Songs passed without incident, bar my forgetting – at different times – both the tune and the words. By contrast, both Daniel, the baritone soloist, and Cliodna, the pianist, were superb. There was a palpable atmosphere in the Hall at the end of Song 4, a collective breath that was held until the Antiphon. I found the D at the end and was glad it was over.

Dan seemed to thoroughly enjoy conducting Poulenc’s Piano Concerto – disjointed and weird as it was -and the orchestra responded to his enthusiasm. There’d been a huge round of applause from the choir when Nico arrived during our rehearsal, and another for his virtuoso performance on the piano. It’s not the main instrument, as in some other concertos, and each section of the orchestra gets their chance to shine. I’d not heard this work before, and probably won’t again.

Stabat Mater went better than I thought it would. At the rehearsal on Wednesday, Dan – referring to the Forest Philharmonic – said “they can play it”. Well, they can – and they did – with an enthusiasm unmatched by mine. Helen sounded wonderful – especially considering she was recovering from a bad cold.

Listening to practice tracks and recordings of the work was probably counter-productive as so much of it sounds wrong. However, the silent four (perhaps five) bars aside, I felt confident, but was still relieved when I managed to pitch the last note correctly. We’ll have to wait until Monday to find out what Dan thought.

Saturday, 11th November 2023, Great Hall, Goldsmiths College.

I missed three things in the run-up to this concert: the Staff Awards on the Friday, where the choir performed in a room largely full of drunk people; the Frankie Boyle gig at the Broadway Theatre in Catford; the final rehearsal on the Saturday morning. All thanks to an ENT consultant who, frankly, should have known better than to bring their virus to a crowded office with no access to fresh air. So, having gone through several hours of self-imposed voice rest, I turned up at 7 with no idea where I was going to stand (hopefully, by one of the basses) or if any last-minute instructions had been given by Dan.

There were no additional notes, but there were two seats reserved for me. I suspect that one of the altos had realised I wasn’t there but would be later on, so saved one independently of the one requested by the seating organiser. Not everyone can always attend the morning rehearsal, so this is quite common.

To be honest, my voice still wasn’t fully recovered, but I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to sing this piece for what must have been the sixth time. This time, though, it was different. This time I knew both Osanna‘s.

The hall was packed – there were even people in the gallery – and they seemed to approve (not of my very minor accomplishment) of the whole performance.