Berberis' World

Saturday, 19 March 2016, Fairfield Halls, Croydon.

The last time I sung Elijah was in 2009, under the barely-moving baton of the formidable – but sadly now the late – Kurt Masur.

This time, it was under the animated baton of the equally formidable – and happily still with us – Dan Ludford-Thomas, and it was just as enjoyable to sing second time round.

The only niggle was… well, there were two niggles. Niggle one was that Dan decided we would sing it in English, not German. From the opening aliterative “Hilf, Herr!”, which can have you hyperventilating if you’re not careful, through the glorious “Aber der Herr sieht es nicht”, with its beautiful descending strings as the sopranos sing “…an vielen, vielen Tausenden…”, and the glorious, if spittle-fuelled, “Da kam ein feuriger Wagen, mit feurigen, feurigen Rosen” the English text doesn’t quite have the gutteral quality necessary for such a completely bonkers piece. That said, the descending strings are still beautiful, and you can have just as much fun with fiery, fiery horses. And I could find nothing in the preface of my Novello score that says you have to drench the front three rows with spittle.

Niggle two was the omission of No. 40. Well, 40 and 41, but 41 is a quartet so leaving it out made no difference to the choir. But No. 40 has some more gorgeous strings: have a look at the middle system on page 192 of the Novello edition – the cellos and double basses get that dotted rhythm for just three bars, but what a glorious three bars they are! Overall, it’s an uplifting sing and I didn’t understand why it was left out.

I could add a third niggle – Croydon – but I was able to drive there and, as you can park more or less underneath Fairfield Halls, it’s a very small one. The venue is actually very nice – big dressing room, a café for coffee, eateries a short walk away – with good staging and excellent sightlines. LCS numbers were bolstered by the Derbyshire Singers, and a good sound was made by all.

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.

Saturday, 5th July, 2014 to Saturday, 28th February, 2015.

I was sitting in the pew at St Stephen & St Mark in Lewisham waiting for the rest of the Lewisham Hospital Choir to arrive when I finally decided to tell Dan that I wouldn’t be attending any more rehearsals for Lewisham Choral Society’s July concert in Cadogan Hall. The programme included James Whitbourn’s ‘Luminosity’, Vaughan Williams’s ‘In Windsor Forest’ and ‘Serenade to Music’.

I’d started practicing these during the rehearsals for Verdi’s Requiem at Croydon and had been, frankly, underwhelmed. However, this wasn’t the main reason for deciding to not participate. The truth was that I’d let the many problems I was having at work affect my not-work life. It seemed easier to ditch the two hours a week I spent doing something I enjoyed for more time doing something I didn’t.

Put like that (and, if I’m going to be honest, this is being written very retrospectively) it sounds mad. I hated ‘African Sanctus’, but went to every rehearsal and gave it my all. I wasn’t even close to hating this programme yet I abandoned it to spend more time in the office. (Cadogan Hall, though lovely, is acoustically dead. This is not a valid reason for not singing there.) Not just that, I was abandoning something that gave me joy for something that was, at the time, quite literally making me ill.

Actually, if that honesty clause is still in effect, it wasn’t something. It was someone. I won’t name them. Not because I’m scared of being sued. I just don’t want to have to type the name and then have to see it in black and white. Or black and blue. (Or is it gold and white..?)

[That last, parenthetical, comment shouldn’t even be here unless I’m time-travelling. Which I’m not. If I could this post wouldn’t exist.]

So, getting back on track. From the start of 2014, the admissions team (which will be referred to henceforth as ‘we’) had had new managers. Both of whom were, by a daily vote with a show of hands, the worst we’d ever known. Ever. Even the one before the one before one of them had been better, and they’d outright lied to us, so that was saying something.

It wasn’t just the emails (each with an unreadable spreadsheet attached) per day, it was that they would then (a) ring to ask if we’d read the emails and the attached unreadable spreadsheet and, after an hour or so, would (b) come to the office to discuss said email and the attached unreadable spreadsheet, now helpfully printed on A4 paper with a font size so small you needed a microscope.

[By ‘unreadable’ I don’t mean it was in a foreign language. That I could have coped with. No, I mean that 95% of the information it contained was irrelevant, and it was set out in such a way that the relevant 5% was almost impossible to find. By ‘helpful’ I mean very, very unhelpful.]

On its own, this was impediment enough to a job that is full-on, head-down, non-stop from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. If you add to this having the one member of the team on whom I could really rely being on various types of leave for six weeks out of the first twelve of 2014, as well as being regularly prevented from leaving on time by a “2 minute” dissection of an unreadable spreadsheet starting at 4.55pm (in reality 30 minutes of the same question being asked over and over again), together with being prevented from leaving the office by someone sitting on the floor with their back to the closed door then you have some idea of the pressure I was under. It wasn’t pretty.

I was, by turns, deeply depressed, extremely angry, and lost-for-words frustrated. In May I fled, in tears, to the HR department where I was almost incoherent in my attempt to try to get someone – anyone – to understand what I was putting up with.

[Just noticed that the word count at the end of that paragraph was 666. If I was superstitious, I might read something into that. I’m not. I do, however, say “Hello, magpie” to solitary magpies. So perhaps I am.]

The cherry on the cake was that, around this time, the one member of team on whom I could really rely told me they were leaving. There would, of course, be a handover to the new team member. Given the complexity of the job and the knowledge which needed to be passed on I suggested two weeks. Not unreasonably, I thought. I was told we could have one. In reality, what we got – what the new team member got – was two and a half days. And that was with the departing team member already doing their new job.

[Later, I learned that, had the incompetent bunglers who called themselves managers and who drew a salary for being thus, the handover could have been four weeks. At this point, I felt that it wasn’t just appalling management, it was an actual conspiracy.]

I took a week off, expecting, on my return, to feel better. I went back and things were, unbelievably, worse.

In August, I learned that a patient with whom I’d had dealings was at death’s door. This is never good to hear, but how much worse it was when I realised that I might have been partly to blame. I was devastated. I’d been asked to do one thing and I’d not done it. And now this patient was dying. It was that simple. It seemed that simple. Of course, these things rarely are and this was no exception.

[I’m not going into detail, save to say that the investigation is nearing its end. The patient reached theirs on Boxing Day, 2014.]

Luminosity, then. Astronomically, 4πd²b. ‘The intrinsic brightness of a celestial object (as distinct from its apparent brightness diminished by distance)’. Or: ‘The rate of emission of radiation, visible or otherwise.’ As opposed to illumination, which is what I badly needed as far as the job was concerned, and which was sadly lacking.

I still have the music. I’ve always purchased scores, only ever hired when purchase – even on the vast-and-getting-exponentially-vaster interweb – wasn’t an option. I may even, as in the case of Elgar’s ‘Dream of Gerontius’, get to sing it at some point in the future.

[What was the point of this? Hang on.]

Drift. Actually, I’m not sure this has a point, or even that it needs one. I’m listening to the audio book of Robert Pirsig’s ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ at the moment. You have always to bear in mind that it was written in 1974, otherwise it’s just some biker dude banging on about how a cheap brand of baked beans is not, can not, and will never be, as good as Heinz.

It’s not. It’s a lot more, and then some. For those who care, I can be found walking to work with a frown on my face occasionally saying out loud “I have no idea what you’re talking about”. I understood most of Parts 1 & 2. It’s Part 3 that has me frowning.

I also finished listening to ‘Catch 22’. I wasn’t sure what to make of this for a long time. Then there was a lightbulb moment when I actually started to care about the characters. I felt sad when they died. I felt happy when they got a break. And just when I wanted to find out more, it ended. Damn you, Heller. Write more next time. And make me care about them sooner, you bastard.

Audio books do force my thought to focus. And it’s only when they focus that things like this happen. A random focussing of seemingly unfocussed ideas amounting to over a thousand words. I wish my other writing was as easy right now. I’ve heard it said that writer’s block happens because a story isn’t ready. There are analogies to which I will not allude.

The source of many of my work woes actually appeared in the office recently. In person. Even though I expressly asked that they be kept away from me. To my surprise, the urge to punch was absent, even if my fingertips tingled ever-so-slightly. I could not, in all conscience, bid them welcome. This, I am pleased to report, was noticed. You? Yes, you. You sweaty, whey-faced, panicky, incompetent excuse for a human being. I am SO over you. I have more space now, and daylight, and fresh air. And I will have a plant soon. One I have propagated myself.

And you have Croydon.

I win.