False Encores

This was a magnificent concert.  One of those you felt genuinely glad to have attended. 

The first half featured a single performer on a single instrument playing a single work; Qin Li-Wei performing the Sonata for Solo Cello by Kodaly.  I must have heard this performed live several dozen times by cellists of all shapes and sizes, some famous, some unknown.  Despite that, it’s never been a work for which I have developed any kind of affection, and I have never even bought a recording of it.  Qin’s performance not only changed my whole opinion of the piece, but drew my attention to qualities in it I had never imagined existed.  The hallmark of a great performance is to make the listener not only reassess a work but to change the listener’s life in some way; and by those criteria, this was a great performance.

Qin found in Kodaly’s music a sense of longing, a sense of dreaming, a depth of passion and emotional intensity, as well as a surprisingly strong feeling of space and place which was more than just the obvious injections of folk-culture which you find in almost all Kodaly’s music.  He took us on a journey which was so absorbing it came as a shock when it ended; had we really all been sitting in that hall listening to him for over half an hour?  I marvelled at the technical feats Qin so effortlessly pulled off, and I lapped up his tightly focused, infinitely shaded tone.  But more than anything else I sat utterly absorbed in a world of profound musicality which effectively re-defined for me what a good performance was all about.

The second half featured two performers on two instruments but still just playing a single work.  Qin was joined by pianist Albert Tiu in Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata. 

If the Kodaly is a work which has never previously struck a chord with me, the Rachmaninov is its polar opposite.  From the moment I first heard it – George Isaacs and Martin Jones performing it at one of the Monday evening Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre Chamber concerts in Cardiff in 1973 – it has been one of my most treasured musical acquaintances.  I have been to a performance whenever I have seen one advertised and my personal record collection includes eight different recordings (admittedly three sent for review and one given in part-payment of my having written the CD booklet notes, but four deliberately bought with my own money in order to deepen my personal relationship with a work I adore).  It may not have been the first work by Rachmaninov I ever heard, but it was undoubtedly the one which made me realise that he was both a truly great composer and one with a unique ability to speak directly to me through his music.  One of my proudest boasts is that I met a man who had met Rachmaninov!  The Cello Sonata is like a deep and dear friend, and it would take a greater performance than any I am ever likely to hear to make me in any way fundamentally change my opinion.

So, since Qin and Tiu had no chance of making me change my mind about the work or even look at it from a different perspective, I was happy just to sit back and luxuriate in their playing.  Tiu is an instinctive Rachmaninovian, but even he excelled himself here, showing profound understanding of the almost orchestral detail in the piano part, and revealing such a depth of empathy with Qin that this stood out as an exceptional example of true chamber playing.  For his part, Qin rode the work’s emotional ebbs and flows with a kind of searing purposefulness which had the heart racing and the skin tingling with the sheer intensity of feeling.  The second movement in particular had a wonderfully incisive rhythmic impetus to it which was as thrilling to me as any music can be, and if the ending of the first movement had not quite come off as well as it might, the ending of the second was a brilliant piece of coordinated musicianship;  Rachmaninov’s gloriously robust and throwaway endings are often the highlight of a great performance.  Towards the end of the finale, I did tend to find Qin’s tight vibrato – more a strained wobble than a full-blooded vibrato – inappropriate to the grandness of the music’s character, but there was no question that the majestically celebratory ending was a fabulously executed climax to a brilliant performance.

I was as enthusiastic as anyone in my applause (well, not perhaps as enthusiastic as the legions of admiring groupies who ululate and shriek whenever either Qin or Tiu, or both, appear on stage) and was happy for them to come on and take as many curtain calls as they wanted.  But then, to misquote Frank Sinatra, they went and spoiled it all by doing something stoopid like an encore. 

After any performance I need to savour and digest what I have just heard.  I need to reprocess the performance in my mind to reaffirm my impressions and to relive some of the highs and lows I experienced during that ephemeral thing we call a musical performance.  After a great performance such as this, I need to go home and take the performance with me in my head, often spending much of the night going over little things which at the time, I hardly noticed.  In that way, like a good meal, I feel I am fully digesting it at leisure and extracting every last gram of goodness and benefit from it.  An encore often denies me that pleasure.

Of course there are occasions where a performance has been so wonderful that nobody wants it to end, and an encore is demanded.  This was certainly the case last night, and I had no immediate objection when the two of them reappeared on stage with Tiu’s page-turner grasping a large copy of music.  (The page-turner had decided after the Rachmaninov that she would take a bow as well as the actual performers.  Page-turners can make or break a performance, as any pianist/organist will tell you, so it’s absolutely right that they should be acknowledged by the audience – it just looks really silly when they bow as if they were doing the playing themsleves.) I did have an objection, however, when far from reinforcing the impact of the Rachmaninov by playing something which would keep that atmosphere alive and prolong the moment for us in the audience, they shattered it with a clumsy tango by Piazzolla.  Great admirer of Piazzolla’s music as I am, there is a place and time for everything, and this was the wrong place and the wrong time for a Piazzolla tango.  On top of that, the playing of this seemed pretty haphazard, and went on for the best part of 10 minutes.  It was like a great meal in a fabulous Chinese restaurant ending with a sour Fortune Cookie which then got stuck in the teeth and revisited the taste-buds for the next few hours as tiny crumbs dislodged and were swallowed.

They compounded this misjudgement by immediately coming back on stage complete with page-turner (another bow after the Piazzolla) clutching yet another musical score.  There had not even been time for the audience to decide whether another encore was required – we were still trying to get to grips with the violent gear-change from Rachmaninov to Piazzolla – yet one was obviously going to be imposed on them regardless.   I made a hasty exit in order to get home and root out a recording of the Rachmaninov to see if I could salvage some memories of the wonderful performance I had experienced earlier.

In the early days of public performance, when audiences were allowed to show their appreciation by applauding whenever they felt the performance deserved it, performers knew what the audience did and did not like, and would happily play the more appreciated items again (hence the word, encore, which quite literally means “again”).  We have countless examples of a movement from a symphony or sonata being repeated, sometimes several times, and even of entire works being encored.  The practice of imposing a totally different piece of music on a programme as an “encore” only came about when audiences started to stop showing their appreciation of specific items in the programme itself.  The conceit of sitting in silence through a complete work, especially one which has no connecting thread between the movements other than the coincidence of tonality, has destroyed the value of the encore and undermined the integrity of the performance.

A young performer told me the other day that he did not like it when people “clapped at the wrong time”, since it put him off.  How much more off-putting is it to have something wholly inappropriate tacked on to the end of a carefully devised programme.  Yet, until audiences begin once again to respond genuinely to what they hear when they hear it, performers will never know what the audience would really like to hear encore (again).

Whither Goest Thou, 21st Century Music?

It was largely by coincidence that all three of the concerts I attended yesterday comprised mainly 21^st century music.  Arch-traditionalist and died-in-the-wool conservative as I am, it is thrilling to know that the desire to compose new music is as strong as it has ever been.  Classical music is not a dying or even a diminishing art if the sheer volume of new music being produced is anything to go by.  Only by writing and performing new music will both the craft of composition and the craft of listening be sustained by the obligation continually to refresh and revalidate musical language.

Of course, the passage of history has ensured that the many thousands of unenticing works written in the past have disappeared from the public consciousness, but with the music of our time, there has been no filter of time to weed out the dross, and it is inevitable that much of the new music we hear today will, quite literally, be gone tomorrow. 

Beyond that, though, there is this to consider: Until the beginning of the 20^th century and the technologies which allowed mass access to music, there simply was not the huge demand for new music that exists today.  A wholly new genre was evolved to help feed this new appetite – the genre of Pop music – but this has in no way diminished society’s need for Classical music; music crafted by creative minds, interpreted by trained minds and listened to by responsive minds.

But while I should (and do) rejoice that so much new music is being written that it can fill three very different concerts in a single day in just one small city (Singapore), I came away from the experience with a niggling sense of disquiet – verging on consternation - about the future of Classical music as a distinctive artistic genre.

The new music of our time seems to be pulling so far in contrary directions that there seems a very real danger that it will split entirely.  That in itself is not a bad thing; rather like the humble but vital earthworm which, when cut in two by a gardener’s spade, continues its existence as two separate creatures, so splitting classical music into two different genres might actually increase its usefulness to society.  Yet I seem to remember reading somewhere that the earthworm’s much-vaunted self-regeneration was a myth; that while one part did, indeed, continue after the division, the other simply shrivelled and died.  If that’s the case, how does our Classical music analogy hold up?

Yesterday’s concerts revealed a schism between areas of 21st century classical music creation which was so wide as to seem largely irreconcilable and possibly irreversible.  On the one hand there was a celebration of cerebral, music demonstrating technical skill at the expense of widespread appeal, and on the other music which went so far to allure the most unresponsive ears that it seemed to lose all sense of technical substance.  And in the middle, a third area in which music itself was entirely peripheral to the performance.  Individually, all three approaches had a value and achieved their aims successfully – I certainly enjoyed all three – but so different were they that I wonder how long they can continue to rub shoulders under the generic but increasingly dysfunctional label, “Classical Music”.

The first of the three concerts kick-started the “Sounding Now Festival” which promises to showcase composers living and working in south-east Asia. (https://soundingnow.blog/festival-2018/)  Somewhat incongruously, however, this concert opened with what appeared to be a left-over performance from the regular student-led Wednesday noon recitals at Yong Siew Toh Conservatory.  Hornists Mindy Chang and Alexander Ian Oon, with the gloriously incongruous but brilliant pianist, Nicholas Loh, performed Richard Bissill’s Time and Space. The work dates from 2001, so it did (just) fit into a programme devoted to 21^st century music, but musically it was so detached from anything else in the programme it seemed to inhabit a wholly different genre.  As a performance this was not just outstanding, it was almost certainly the very finest performance by any of the student performers in the entire Wednesday series this academic year.  It would have drawn gasps of admiration from any audience, anywhere, and while it received the usual supportive noises from the student audience, it was obvious that even they, usually so pointedly immune from the charms or otherwise of performances presented to them by their peers, found this to be something out of the ordinary.  Bissill’s work was hardly a great masterpiece, but it had a quality which ensured it lingered in the memory long after the performance was over.  It was well-written, technically challenging, emotionally engaging, and attractive both superficially on the ear and more substantively on the intellect.  Of all the 21^st century works I heard yesterday, this is the only one which could, conceivably, still be in the repertory 100 years from now. 

The student composers whose works were presented in the concert had the enormous good fortune to have their music performed by an absolutely cracking team of specialist new-music performers from Germany, “hand werk”.  (I do wonder with these groups who tour the world performing only new music, whether they go back to their hotels each evening, sit in comfort in armchairs drinking lager and watching television, or whether they stand naked on their heads on external window-ledges sipping vinegar through tiny straws?)  It is difficult to imagine that these new works could have been more sympathetically and competently presented, and the fact that each work’s distinctive character and latent quality was so clearly conveyed, is down to their stupendous skill as performers and interpreters. 

Each work required substantial stage re-organisation.  Perhaps conservatories should introduce classes on stage management and crewing which are as demanding as those on playing the piano or conducting an orchestra; new music seems to rely so much on stage management, that this aspect often assumes greater importance than the music itself.  To cover these long interruptions to the flow of music, the various student composers took to the stage to talk about their work.  Not every one had completely grasped the techniques of talking into a microphone (in some cases the banging on the end, the breathing into it and the heavy “testing 1-2-3” were as entertaining as the music itself), but all felt it appropriate to outline the circumstances and inspiration behind their compositions.

The world is tumbling into chaos.  The Cold War seems to have reignited. Arab-Israeli and Arab-Arab conflicts are raging with horrendous loss of life.  The Syrians seem determined to kill their own people by whatever means Assad chooses.  Boko Haram continues to kidnap, rape and murder school girls in Nigeria with apparent impunity. The ceasefire in Northern Ireland seems to be teetering on the brink of collapse.  The US and China seem to be heading for conflict.  A belligerent US administration seems intent on stirring up conflict with its neighbours in Mexico and Cuba.  And whatever the result of the Malaysian election, it seems certain, like Brexit in the UK, to tear communities apart in a proxy and (so far) bloodless civil war.  Surely there is enough in our world to give young composers a real focus for their creative outlet, be it anger, sorrow, religious conviction or deliberate indifference; after all, great art has always flourished at times of conflict.  Yet what did these student composers want to express in their music?  

It was almost as if, for them, music was unconnected with society; that music was a means of escapism rather than of confronting and coming to terms with realities.  One composer inhabited an imaginary world of dragons and fictional languages, another the strains and stresses of student life, and another found creative inspiration in the fact that his room at home was “moderately untidy”.  I blame Richard Strauss, who elevated the mundanity of domesticity to the level of creative art and thereby legitimised it for subsequent generations of composers.

There were some very good ideas here, and all of the composers had clearly grasped the essential skills of writing music.  Most of it I found absorbing, if occasionally slightly over-stretching its basic material, but there was one piece which I felt revealed a genuinely creative mind.  However, while its composer, Noah Diggs, had made highly effective use of performers moving, speaking and playing, and had posed arresting philosophical questions in what he had written, we have seen it all before.  He has constructed a persona which revolves around the “what-planet-am-I-on?” concept which, while both entertaining and intriguing, runs the risk of becoming almost a self-parody.  Here’s a potentially brilliant composer in danger of falling into creative sterility by resorting to the easy and familiar rather than continuing to challenge himself as well as his performers and their audience. 

As for the rest, one felt that the techniques of composing were the beginning and the ending of the process.  None of it smiled, none of it invoked anger, none of it induced tears.  Music should not necessarily do that, but it should, at least, resonate in some way with the society in which it was born and a humanity which exists beyond merely exercising the intellect.

The second concert comprised just a single performer, a single musical instrument, and a very large amount of electronic and computer gadgetry; so much, in fact, that the sheer logistics of setting it all up by an over-stretched stage crew delayed the concert’s start by half and hour.  It was billed as a viola recital, but it was in truth nothing of the sort.  It was a bi-media (sound and vision) installation in which the occasional sounds of the viola merged imperceptibly with a richly textured pre-recorded soundscape and a continually moving, largely abstract projected series of images.  This all made for an absorbing 45 minute show.  (So absorbing, in fact, that the handful of audience scattered around the darkened hall seemed intent on preserving it for posterity through the camera apps on their smartphones.  I was particularly taken by the lady in front of me who, determined to capture some sense of the completely dark hall, continually raised her phone to take a picture, only for the flash to come on, and for her quickly to cover the offending light with her hand.  She kept trying, but every time she looked at the phone to see how the last photo had come out, all it showed was a close up of the palm of her hand.)

The musical sounds – often immensely attractive ones – were layered to create an enticing soundscape which was effectively allied to the images so that it all coalesced into a conglomerate whole in which music and projected visuals lost their individual identities.  As an experience it would have been wonderful had not Mervin Wong committed two fateful blunders.  First, he explained that this was in no way a completed or even fully thought-through work, but something “in its very infant phase”.  Why should any audience feel it worth their while to sit through something which is not ready for public consumption?  Far better to describe it as “evolutionary” and imply that it is complete as it stands even if in the future it may change; that might even get us to come back to hear it a second time.  Second, he promised a “compendium of sounds extracted from the viola”.  The viola was often presented as a lyrical instrument, with long, sustained eloquently expressive lines, and once or twice it even did some pizzicato.  But there was no sense that this was exploring the instrument.  Had he told us that it was “utilizing the latent beauty of the viola”, nobody would have been disappointed – for it did precisely that, and to quite hypnotic effect. 

The third concert was a performance by a choral group who reforms itself after each of its bi-annual performances.  This year’s manifestation of the Chamber Choir was one of the best yet, the sound rich and the voices singularly well blended.  There were some very fine choral singers here, and their conductor, Chong Wai Lun, had clearly worked them up to a fine state of readiness over the years.  Despite being dressed in uniform black, it was interesting to note how much bare flesh was exposed.  Various lengths of dresses and skirts only emphasised the fact that the shortest skirts were extremely short indeed, while the tendency of some of the male singers to roll up their sleeves made it look at times like a party of grave-diggers about to pick up their shovels.  Nobody’s sleeves were rolled up tighter than Chong’s, which made it look as if he was more a gardener tending to his flower beds than a man coaxing fine music from his singers.  The gardener analogy is good one, though, and I was thinking at the time what kind of flowers he might have been nurturing with so much dedicated elbow-grease.  I came to the decision that these were tulips; big, bold, beautiful but unsubtle blooms.

That my mind was wandering down aimless garden paths was an inevitable consequence, not of the performance (which was very good) but of the music (which was dire).  The programme chosen offered no scope whatsoever for the choir to do anything other than sing notes in tune and pronounce words.  It was a programme which celebrated the vacuous; and as such was entirely typical of so much choral music written this century.  Choral composers have discovered that certain chords sound quite nice when sung by choirs, and build entire works around the continual repetition of those chords in unrelated juxtaposition.  One work, which stretched itself out for three complete movements, seemed to revolve around the same basic chords but not necessarily presented in the same order.  It was frightening to realise that this completely innocuous, superficial and bland music was inspired by Shakespeare.  What had poor Shakespeare done that our brave new world should have such people in it that they belittle his genius so?

The agonies did not stop there.  A work which told a story about a Chinese magic paint broach did just that, and did it so directly that one wondered why anybody had bothered to add any music to the mix.  What a shame that such fine singers were given such brainless stuff to sing.  It sounded nice – but the minute it was over I could not recall a single thing that had been sung.

What is a 21^st century composer to do?  Should music be inaccessible to all except those who appreciate and understanding its technicalities, should it be peripheral to an entertainment which involves other media, or should it be so blatantly accessible to everyone that it loses all vestiges of artistic credibility.  If all three are legitimate paths, then I have little hope.  However, tacked on accidentally as he was, I can’t but think that Richard Bissill has the answer, and music could do a lot worse than follow his lead.

Keys to Great Composing

Organists need not read this; they know it already.  For others, especially those who claim to be musicians, it should make salutary reading.

Perhaps these monks were admiring the young Mozart's organ playing skills.
One suspects their modern day counterparts would more likely be wondering what the noise
was and why he wasn't doing something more worshipful like playing the guitar or drums

What do Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as well as Telemann, Handel, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms and Dvořák have in common, other than being composers whom a majority of music lovers regard as "great"?  They all played the organ.

I would argue that it is no coincidence that most, if not all, of these “great” composers were organists, and in most cases were organists before they were composers.  Living in societies where Christianity was an accepted part of daily life, and the organ having become an entrenched part of Christian worship in both Catholic and Protestant churches, one could suggest that any musician would inevitably gravitate towards the organ, it being the one musical instrument everybody in a single community would have known.  There is certainly a lot of truth in that, and it is certain that in Bach’s, Mozart’s, Haydn’s, Beethoven’s and Schubert’s cases, as well as in many others, their youthful involvement with the organ was brought about by circumstances rather than personal choice.  But even if that is so, it may well have been the very catalyst which set them off on the path to compositional greatness, and that without the organ they would never have produced the bodies of outstanding work they went on to produce.



The church where Schubert was organist - now dubbed the Schubertkirche

A human voice breathes naturally, a violin bow phrases music naturally by virtue of the limitations of its length, a wind instrument is governed by the finite power of a player’s lungs and lips.  All these natural phenomena impose a natural musicality on these instruments.  This needs to be harnessed and adapted, but is still a fact that, at root, there is musicality built into these instruments.  Not so the organ, where the sound has no natural qualities at all; it can be sustained indefinitely, it can be broken at random, it can be an unbroken legato or an unconnected staccato and, perhaps more than anything else, there is no natural variability in the volume or intensity of the sound it produces.  Everything which a singer, violinist or flautist does technically merely improves the natural musicality of their instrument; the organist is obliged to input every single detail to transform the instrument’s unnatural sound into a musical one.

My belief is that the organ is a machine rather than a musical instrument, and that to get it to produce legitimate music, requires a level of trained musicianship no other instrumental discipline requires.  Of course, a vast number of organists do not possess that sort of musicianship and thus so much organ playing and organ music is not just dull, but almost terminally so.  However, the intellectual, artistic and motor skills required in combination to transform that machine which we call an organ into a credible musical instrument are so advanced and demanding that only exceptional people can succeed.  Is it any wonder, then, that these exceptional people have occasionally gone on to become “great” composers?

It is often argued that since most “great” composers (especially those of the so-called “Classical” era), did not write organ music, they did not care for the organ as a serious outlet for their artistic creativity.  However, that flies in the face of every known fact about their involvement with the organ; Mozart even famously described an organ as a “veritable King of instruments”.  The issue lies in the fact that in the Catholic church of the later 18^th and early 19^th centuries, music was already beginning its decline.  From the Council of Trent to the musically-disastrous Second Vatican Council, music increasingly was devalued by the Catholic Church, and those charged with providing it found little scope for creativity.  Thus it was that virtually all these composers chose not to write instrumental music for the church. (Mozart was a notable exception with his 17 Epistle Sonatas, which are tiny single-movement works which cover the short length of time it took the episcopal procession to move from the sanctuary to that part of the cathedral where the Gospel was read.) Instead, they used the organ to cover those points in the service where non-vocal music was required, and improvised in order to ensure that the music did not overstay its function. 

Improvisation has long been an essential tool in the organist’s armoury, and I would suggest that the obligation to improvise frequently and often at unpredictable lengths builds up a creative and imaginative mind which is unique to organists.  Any organist who has played the organ at a wedding where a bride arrives late will know only too well the feeling of improvising under the shadow of sudden curtailment or extension for interminable minutes.  In the days when the Bridal Chorus from Wagner’s Lohengrin was de rigueur among arriving brides, I had trained myself to move from whichever remote key my improvisation was in when the little red light announcing the bride’s arrival at the west door flashed, to B flat major (the opening of the Wagner) in just three chords.  We could do that sort of thing in the late 20^th century when rules of harmony were considerably freer than they had been in the 18th and 19^th centuries.  What mental processes would have been necessary to organists working in those times in order to shape improvisations without offending ears accustomed to more rigid rules of harmony?  No wonder the organ became a breeding ground for “great” composers.

As if thinking over the implications of tonality, rhythm, and melodic coherence in an improvisation was not demanding enough, the sheer physical properties of an organ require both physical and mental stamina in a way no other musical activity does.  Like a pianist, the organist has to articulate the keys.  Unlike the pianist, the organist also has to articulate – often with almost equal virtuosity – a pedalboard requiring two feet each with three distinct playing parts (heel, toe, side).  Then there are the swell and expression pedals which have to be used to create arterially a level of dynamic shading which must sound perfectly natural; some organs have three, sometimes even more, of these; which have to be operated while the feet are still playing the pedals.  Then there are the stops, the essential knobs and switches which have to be manipulated frequently to create the wide range of tonal colours and effects which, on any other instrument, come naturally, but on the organ need to be artificially activated in order to create a natural-sounding effect.  The skill in choosing and managing these without interrupting the flow of the music is one which taxes many organists so far that they need to call in supernumeraries to undertake this essential aspect of playing the organ.

In short, the mental agility and physical vitality needed to play the organ has no equal in any field of artistic human endeavour.  No wonder organists become “great” composers, and no wonder few “great” composers have ever existed who have not been organists.  So next time some idiot suggests that the organ is beneath contempt (as so many musicians and Christian ministers do) remind them that without the organ, mankind would have been denied the supreme examples of transcendental art which the world recognises as “great” music.

 

The Real Sistine Chapel Choir

Having heard a concert last night of music sung in the 16th century by the Sistine Chapel Choir, I felt it appropriate to draw attention to the latest recording from the current Sistine Chapel Choir.  It really is lovely.  Here's my review from MusicWeb Internaitonal (from whom the disc can be purchased). 

To hear music especially written for the Sistine Chapel, much of it by former members of the Sistine Chapel choir, sung by the present-day Sistine Chapel Choir and recorded in the Sistine Chapel is reason enough to celebrate the release of this disc.  That every work on the disc is a true gem, a miniature masterpiece (to quote the booklet notes, “the finest polyphonic works of the Renaissance and Baroque periods”), and that some of it has not been heard before outside the Sistine Chapel is an even more compelling reason to seek this disc out.  And, if further inducement was needed, they have brought in no less a figure than Cecilia Bartoli to be the first female voice ever to be recorded alongside this all-male choir. 

Monseigneur Massimo Palombella, the choir’s director, has been given free rein of the Vatican’s huge musical library, and has clearly relished the opportunity to delve into musicological research not only in finding the music and preparing it for performance, but in philosophising over the ways in which it might have originally been performed.  This has led to some decisions about performance which he puts into practice in this disc, one of which is to place smaller sections of the choir in the gallery to contrast with the main body of the choir recorded standing before the altar.  This, however, is not always evident in a recording which keeps the voices, wherever they are in the chapel, at roughly the same distance from the microphones. On top of that, carpets were laid down for the recording sessions in a bid to dampen the chapel’s voluminous acoustic, and while the resultant sound is warm and immensely comforting, surrounded by a pleasing halo of acoustic space, it also has a muffled quality with detail in the lower voices often obscure.

The programme itself draws on music which is associated with historic Papal celebrations of that period of the church’s year which extends from Advent through Christmas and Epiphany to Candlemas, and ranges from the 12^th century (Peronitus) to the 17^th (Allegri).  There are three works billed as “World Premiere Recordings” by Dufay, Allegri and Marenzio, as well as several well-known motets, including an atmospheric performance of Victoria’s O magnum mysterium. Those who know Giovanni Allegri only through his famous Lenten setting of the Miserere mei will immediately spot some stylistic differences, but this performance of his Nasceris, alme puer suffers badly from an irritating habit Palombella has of excessive phrase bulging - introducing sudden, short but heavy swelling dynamics - and of pulling up the ends of phrases abruptly (presumably to let the acoustic finish the job off).  Perhaps that tendency is at its most annoying in Palestrina’s Canite tuba in Sion where the continual dynamic surges induce a sensation akin to mal de mer.

Nevertheless Palombella has built a fine choir here which is easily in its element both with the music and the environment (the booklet includes a stunning picture of the choir in rehearsal all but overwhelmed by Michelangelo’s great altar wall fresco of The Last Judgement, and, as if to remind us how church music has changed since the time when these works were written, another photo of them gathered round an electric keyboard).  The performances are well prepared and effectively and confidently delivered.  Quicker passagework is not always secure - there’s a moment of unfortunate scruffiness in the livelier passagework of Nonino’s motet Hodie nobis caelorum Rex – and in places tuning of the lower parts wobbles.  But overall this is a disc which exudes calm and beauty and where technicalities pale into insignificance beside the supreme loveliness of the music and the recorded sound.  My real concern is that it is in danger of becoming swamped by its own beauty.  Try as I might, I find it difficult to identify clear differences between the works being performed; after a while they all merge into a kind of smooth, conglomerate, velvety aural wallpaper which, for all its supreme loveliness, loses its impact simply because the superficial effect is so appealing.

Bartoli’s contribution is to Peronitus’s Beata viscera Mariae Virginis.  It may last less than four minutes of music, but it is four minutes of absolute sublimity.  Bartoli beautifully encapsulates the essence of a text which conveys the joy, wonder and mystery of the Virgin birth.

The Fake Sistine Chapel Choir

Singapore is full of surprises.  That could be – indeed, I believe it has been – used as a tourist marketing slogan.  But while foreign visitors might be surprised at what Singapore has to offer (I saw one tourism promotion boasting that Singapore “had the only revolving restaurant in the world atop a flour silo” - wow!!!!!) the biggest surprises come to those of us who live here and like to attend classical music concerts.

In an average week I would reckon to attend between 5 and 10 concerts; exceptionally I might attend anything up to 20 or, very occasionally, just a couple.  I am not alone.  There is a tiny group of dedicated concert-goers who I bump into at various venues and occasionally share frantic journeys across town to get from one concert to another.  Like any group of specialist enthusiasts, we share notes, and it’s always good to be able to claim to have visited a concert about which the others did not know.   It’s usually one of the others who has rooted out an event the rest of us missed, but now it’s my turn;  I found a concert last night which none of the others knew about.  In a very large audience, I recognised none of Singapore’s habitual concert-goers or high-profile classical music enthusiasts.

While it might be a boast for sad, boring souls like myself, on a serious note, Singapore’s pathetically and chaotically ad hoc concert scene is a national disgrace and substantially undermines the state’s credibility as a cultural hub.  There may be much going on, but if nobody knows about it, what purpose does it all serve?

Perhaps the problem stems from Singapore’s uncontrollable obsession with social media.  (This is a terrible misnomer, since in effect it is a wholly anti-social media.  The sight of every single local totally engaged with their media devices on the MRT, the bus, walking in the street or sitting in a café oblivious to their surroundings and those physically close to them, creates the impression of Singaporeans as a rude, anti-social, selfish people whose attitude to their fellow man is one that refuses to acknowledge their very existence.  This does not go unnoticed by visitors, but also has very serious social effects at home.  I was at a social services presentation yesterday in which the very real issue of families breaking was addressed. A significant contributory factor to this breakdown of family life in Singapore was identified as family members being so absorbed in social media that they no longer interact or share communal experiences.) In the case of concerts and arts events, the appalling belief that reality does not exist beyond the platform of social media, means that those presenting arts events can only perceive of publicity as mentioning them on a social media platform.

That was how I learnt about last night’s concert.

A couple of weeks back I attended a concert given by the NAFA choir.  NAFA are dreadful in their use of social media as a promotional tool.  A few days before each event, they post it on some platform or other.  I imagine they leave it to the last moment so that, should by accident any of Singapore’s musical cognoscenti notice, it will be too late for them to re-organise their schedules and attend. That’s usually the case with me, but as it happened (and much to NAFA’s chagrin) on this occasion, I was not only free but in that part of town, and went along.  I wish I had not.  However, a young man sidled up to me as we waited for NAFA to get its act together sufficiently to open the doors to the few social-media harpies who had gathered, and asked me why I had never attended a concert given by Cappella Martialis.  My answer was simple.  I had never heard of them and never heard of any concert they might have given or were planning to give.  Even then, the young man seemed to be very secretive and, rather than hand me any kind of notice about a forthcoming concert, asked if he could “friend” me on Facebook.

Now Facebook, as we all know, is merely a way to open our hearts, souls and bank accounts to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the good folk of Cambridge Analytica, and I use it merely to induce nausea at the sight of so many ghastly dogs and cats and so many hideously foul looking plates of food.  However, this young man seemed to think it would give him some pleasure, so I accepted.  From that day I was bombarded with regular “updates” on a concert held by Cappella Martialis which eventually took place last night. 

The problem with Facebook as a channel of event publicity is that it has no mass outreach.  Facebook reaches just those whom you allow it to reach – your assigned so-called “friends” (another misnomer since most of Facebook “friends” have never met each other in real life).  The chances of someone accidentally coming across a post announcing an event in Singapore are slight, and the chances of someone accidentally coming across a post announcing an event in Singapore who is actually in Singapore at the time are negligible.  Much better to throw up a few strategic posters here and there (if not quite going to the extremes the Singapore Symphony is currently attempting by draping most lampposts in the city with banners announcing Kavakos and Shostakovich) which will attract the attention of passers-by (those non-Singaporean passers-by, at least, who look up from their smartphones as they go about their daily life), or place a few small notices in strategic locations where concert-goers are prone to congregate (viz. other concerts).  But Cappella Martialis had done none of this, and so gave the impression that unless you were one of their select gang, you were not really welcome. 

Finding the concert venue was a slightly surreal experience.  On a wet, chilly and dark Sunday evening I found myself splashing through the dimly lit streets of Hougang in search of the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  When I eventually found it, it was like a beacon of joy in a desert of desolation.  A beautiful, brightly lit, white edifice, in authentic Gothic church style set back in a sea of relative tranquillity against the ocean of noise and bustle outside.  Inside it was a little drab, just plain white walls and a peeling ceiling, with serried ranks of the ugliest and most uncomfortable church pews I have ever encountered in a lifetime of church pew observation.  But despite this, it was still very welcoming and had the sense of a true oasis.  And it has to be said that the people at the door were most friendly and welcoming, and with a very large crowd in attendance, I suspect that Cappella Martialis not only have a lot of friends, but also a very loyal following.

According to the lavish and gorgeously presented programme book (I attach a link to it here - https://www.dropbox.com/s/rvmfp5uxo3wbwa7/Papal%20Pascha%202018%20programme%20final.pdf) – Cappella Martialis comprises 20 mixed voices and is conducted by Goh Hsuanhsuan.  They were formed, it would seem, in 2011, with the express intention of performing “lesser-known gems of the early choral tradition…particularly from the Renaissance and Mediaeval periods”.  They would seem to have some profound and intelligent scholarship behind them, and ideas on texts, performing practice, historical context and programme building were compellingly presented in a marvellous pre-concert talk.  Last night’s concert, which attempted to re-enact the music performed in the Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s Basilica in Rome on Easter Day sometime around the end of the 16^th century, included the Missa: Victimae paschali laudes by Giovanni Animuccia (c.1520-1571) as well as various motets, antiphons and psalms by Palestrina, Victoria, Anerio and Razzi.

If getting to the concert was a surreal experience, so was listening to it.  Never in a thousand years would I ever have expected in Singapore to sit in a traditional church at night, the rain pattering on the windows, the audience feeling snugly cocooned inside, listening to an unaccompanied choir singing this beautiful music with obvious love, care, affection and scholarship.  If I were to leave Singapore tomorrow and never come back, it would be the one memory which would remain with me to my dying day.

I need write nothing else.  This was a lovely event and I am so glad I went.

But, like all concerts, there is a tendency to reflect on what might have been done better and therefore made it a more magical experience.  And without in any way diminishing the brilliant work of scholarship behind this programme and the dedication and commitment of the singers, I would suggest that there was quite a lot which could have been done to make it truly an uplifting experience.

Most obviously, there was a sense that it had not been fully rehearsed as a performance.  The programme alternated between the sections of the Mass sung by the whole choir – and here I must praise unreservedly the choir for its fabulously rich and beautifully balanced sound – and chants presented by a trio of men (always beautifully sung).  But looking at them as they moved about on the stage was like looking at a flock of sheep in a field with no dog to guide them.  They milled around, some heading off in the wrong direction before frantically chasing after the others, several looking around completely lost as if they had no idea what was happening next, and even the trio of men often debating amongst themselves what they were going to sing, where they were going to sing it, and which note they were going to choose to start it on.  Goh herself, frantically waving her hand around to try and shepherd her unruly flock into some semblance of order, made no attempt to disguise the fact that she was about to start the Credo before the chanted preface, and her hurried attempt to cancel her downbeat was compounded by the fact that she had sung out the starting notes and then had to re-check them against her tuning fork.  Musically she kept them tightly together, but whether to do so using quite such a strict and metronomic beat served the music as effectively as had the scholarship behind the programme planning was doubtful.

There is nothing worse than a choir marching on and off stage with military precision, but this choir rambling around like lost sheep was only marginally preferable.  A happy medium can be reached – informality with discipline – and creates a much better impression amongst those who are there for the music rather than to support friends.

I loved the sound the choir made, but there was always a sense of anxiety at the start due to a number of singers not having really picked up the pitch from Goh’s tuning fork.  Why not use a pitch pipe?  It avoids all that effort of working out intervallic relationships from an A, it avoids the ridiculous spectacle (from behind) of watching a conductor thrust the fork against her skull, and it provides a much clearer note for the choir to pick up.  As it was, there were issues of missed notes and wrong notes – but never an issue of inner tuning or intonation.

In short, this was one of the loveliest concerts I have ever attended in Singapore and, Facebook posts or not, this is a choir who I will endeavour to follow whenever they perform since I admire their scholarship, their programming and their collective sound.  Mention was made of a further concert in June.  Count me in!  But as a man called out from the pew in front of me when this forthcoming concert was announced, “Where will it be?”.  Once again, it seems, Cappella Martialis likes to shroud their activities in mystery. 

I can announce it will be on 23^rd and 24^th June and will comprise “Music of Portuguese Malacca 1511-1641”.  But I hope they will try and make the event a little more polished.  If any of the Popes in the 16^th and 17^th centuries had seen their choir showing such complete disregard for the niceties of ceremony and decorum as was evident last night, I fear the music of the Roman Catholic Church would have disintegrated long before it actually did.

A Collection of Choirs

If there has been a time during the years in which I have been associated with Singapore’s musical life when quite so many choirs of an outstanding standard have performed independently of each other, I certainly cannot remember it.  But, as a visiting Australian lady said to me today as we sat waiting for the latest visiting choir to start its concert, “We just sort of stumbled across this one”; too often we find out about these things long after they have taken place.

Despite this choir having made the journey all the way from England, publicity was not so much limited as non-existent, and while the word-of-mouth system (which was how I got to hear of this concert) clearly worked – there was a goodly crowd assembled – I can’t but think how many more Singaporean choral music lovers would have relished having had the chance to be here.  They missed something pretty exceptional.

The St Catharine’s College Consort – 8 singers drawn from the choir of St Catherine’s College Cambridge – were in Singapore to give a lunchtime concert at St Andrew’s Cathedral.  Their programme was just 45 minutes, and began and ended with an organ solo, but it was 45 minutes of sheer choral bliss.

Good organ playing is rare in Singapore.  The Esplanade gave up on organ recitals years ago (perhaps they were attracting the wrong sort of people), Victoria Concert Hall stages them intermittently but usually covers up the organ as much possible by pulling in other artists to steal the show, and so far as I am aware, not a single one of those churches in Singapore which boasts fine organs ever opens its doors to regular recitals.  They are missing a trick.  A lunchtime recital not only attracts plenty of dedicated followers of the organ, but opens eyes and ears of casual passers-by to an area of music often regarded as too specialist to be of any real interest.

It’s a long time since I have heard such an invigorating and stimulating performance of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in G major (BWV541) – in Singapore or anywhere else - as that which framed this concert.  Owen Reid played it with wonderful vitality and brought out that immensely sunny disposition which so attracted Albert Schweitzer to the piece.  He wrote poetically about it being infused by a bright, cheerful light.  The St Andrew’s organ, part pipe - part electronic, sounded absolutely sizzling in this, and Reid’s brisk, highly articulate playing meant that nobody’s heart could have failed to be lifted by his effervescent playing.

As I left the cathedral after the concert, I overheard one of the choir’s sopranos suggesting that the thing that had gone best for her was Byrd’s Sing Joyfully.  I’m not sure about that.  It certainly went very well, and again, as with the organ prelude, the vitality and energy of the choir was irresistible.  But if asked to name the one piece which stood out above the others in sheer performance quality, I’d have to opt for John Bennet’s madrigal, All Creatures Now.  Here the exquisite balance director (and second bass) Edward Wickham drew from his singers using the most subtle and surreptitious direction, coupled with their immaculate diction and tremendously crisp rhythmic vigour, made this a truly outstanding performance.

Perhaps most memorable of all was an ingenious arrangement of The Beatles’ hit, Money can’t buy you love which was mischievously brought into the programme as an anonymous Elizabethan madrigal called “Diamond Ring”.  Elizabethan it was – Elizabeth II that is – and madrigal-like it most certainly was, for this arrangement turned it into a gem of clever contrapuntal activity and intimate part-writing which was superbly delivered by these eight singers.  It really did come across as a beautifully written Elizabethan madrigal, sounding neither incongruous nor ridiculous in the company of some genuine examples of the genre.

One soprano was sent to sit out the medieval Kyrie Deus Creator Omnium included in the programme as an example of music contemporaneous with the founding of St Catherine’s.  Predating Renaissance polyphony yet post-dating medieval monody, this was an intriguing and tantalising glimpse into a rarely heard musical world which would have been the kind of sound reverberating around English chapels and cathedrals in the 15^th century.  I doubt such things have been heard in Singapore more than a couple of times before.

Only very occasionally did the eight voices seem insufficient to carry the musical message fully.  In Wilbye’s Weep, Weep, Mine Eyes it was not the number of singers but a slight tendency towards top-heaviness which denied the madrigal of its full impact, and to a certain extent that was an issue with Wendell Whalum’s arrangement of the spiritual The Lily of the Valley.  We really needed more bass depth and inner weight to give this its full impact.  Not so Gordon Langford’s opulent arrangement of The Oak and the Ash.  Here, Wickham had balanced his singers so well that the rich, lush harmonies really did sound as if the choir was twice as large. 

Wickham’s short and neat introductions helped make this a pleasingly informal event – as lunch time recitals should always be – but I wondered at his assertion that Moeran’s setting of Shakespeare’s Sigh no more, Ladies was “jazzy”.  E J Moeran had a distinctive musical voice which blends a sense of nostalgia with a vaguely bitter-sweet English pastoral-ness – and that, rather than any obvious jazziness, was exactly what was delivered in this exquisite performance.

Two part-songs by Stanford completed this lovely programme.  However, two small concerns arose here.  The occasional contrapuntal lines of Beati Quorum Via were lost by a very week tenor line and an overpowering soprano one, while the fact that the two alto voices – one male one female – really did not begin to blend was cruelly exposed.  Sounding awfully like Sullivan’s The Lost Chord but without the aroma of the Victorian parlour, The Long Day Closes had something of surfeit of sentimentality about it, which was slightly undermined by the shallow bass.

But, as an exhibition of both fine choral singing and exquisite music-making, this was possibly the best in the recent upsurge of choral concerts here.

Too Many Words?




An installation outside the concert hall seems to offer a
salutatory warning about the dangers of audience members
being given hefty books to hold (or perhaps it's a
warning about obese audience members - mea culpa)

Audience members filing into last night’s concert given by vocal students of Alan Bennett (collectively calling themselves Cantiamo) were issued with a huge programme book.  I always thought my programme notes were excessively verbose, but this gigantic tome stretched to 14 A4 sides (or, to our American friends, “kinda foolscap”) covered in close print with not an illustration or advert to break it up.  There were lists of items being performed (26 songs by 8 composers), lists of the singers performing (14), lists of the pianists accompanying them (5, although one – April Foo – was accidentally left off the list) and a very brief biography of just one of the performers, pianist Roger Vignoles.  That took care of 2 pages.  The rest of the book was devoted to the French language song texts and translations into a vaguely familiar language which, to be honest, was so inscrutable as to itself require further translation.  (I ask you, does any person even with the most elevated command of English utter such phrases as “They plod like pompous auctioneers attired in dumb ostentation”, “Malicious doubles sacrificed the one to the other immaculate brothers with confused shadows in a desert of blood”, “It resembles the soft noise that waving grass exhales”, ”A warm fragrance circulates about the turning paths”, or my particular favourite, “You had nothing but subterranean glows in your heart” - I think the medical term for this is atrial fibrillation.) 

The trouble with all these so-called translations available on the internet is that they have been largely created by online translations which, as everyone knows, are worse than useless. But what else is one to do?  I have over the years built up a stock of translations which I myself have made, but these not only do not attempt to match the rhythm, meter or word placing of the originals (I’m not that clever!), but many of them are very loose indeed.  Even so, for few of these songs had I my own translation available, and it would have taken me longer to come up with original idiomatic translations than I have time left on this earth (assuming I live, like my father, to be 100).  So we must be thankful for the hideously deformed travesties of linguistic beauty served up by these online translations since, without them, we would not have the vaguest idea what the words meant unless we ourselves were fluent in original language.

However, I question the need to provide texts at all, whether or not a translation is offered. 

So familiar to those of
us with our roots in the
British choral society.

I go back long enough to remember the days when British choral societies, putting on their annual oratorio performance, would hire the music (invariably from Novello who had the exclusive rights to Messiah, Creation, Elijah, Dream of Gerontius, et.al.) along with books of words which were distributed amongst the audience so that they could follow every word as it was sung.  We didn’t have the problem of translations – all great oratorios were in English (including the St Matthew Passion, which would have come as a surprise to Bach) and if they occasionally ventured into Latin, everyone in the audience would have learnt enough at school not to require a translation.  (An interesting issue I had with Welsh choirs I conducted was the preponderance of older singers who could only read in sol-fa notation.  Librarians had to find out how many copies of the vocal score were needed in sol-fa and how many in what the Welsh quaintly refer to as hen nodiant  - “old notation”).  Publishers had all these to hand (at a fee) as well as audience books printed in Welsh for those who could not read English – no side-by-side translations, merely the words in a different language to that which was being sung.  Cost considerations soon put an end to that and, in any case, most choral societies performed the same oratorios over and over again, so not only did the audience know the words off by heart, but most of the singers did as well. 

For the ignorant -
this is what Sol-fa and Welsh look like in juxtaposition

I wonder, though, what value there is in allowing the audience to see the texts as they are sung.  I have seen recitals where texts are projected above the singers (following on from the now common practice of surtitling in opera) and others where someone actually reads out the words before the singer sings them.  Do we need all this?  Surely following the words is as detrimental to appreciating the totality of a vocal performance as following the scores when you listen to a purely instrumental concerto (something which only a deaf person, someone suffering from an excess of musical pretention, or a down and out idiot would ever do).  Our job as an audience is to appreciate the performance on its own terms; and if the singer’s diction is that poor we can’t make out what’s being sung, then we are quite right in saying that the performance was not good without having to resort to documentary reference sources to realise the fact.

I frequently write booklet notes for vocal recitals – for some reason, especially in the Middle East – and my policy which is happily accepted without question by most concert promoters, none of whom seems to have received any notable adverse feedback from the audience, is never to print texts or translations but to write a short synopsis of the song.  This way the audience knows what the song is about and can appreciate it unencumbered by the minutiae of the complete text.

If presenting a song as a work of art, complete with its mingling of words, music and expressive nuances, is what singers do (and I would have thought that is what their function in life is) then we need to pay total attention to the performance and not follow the texts.  Pre-armed with a brief outline as to what the song is about, we can realistically assess how well the singer communicates it.

Last night, for example, it would have been useful to know that Kai-Song Chan was singing a song about a spurned lover who had turned to drink and was in an advancing state of intoxication.  When he suddenly hiccupped, covered his mouth and sounded as if his slurds were a bit worred (© Revd. Spooner) there were some in the audience who, struggling to understand the translation, wondered whether he was unwell.  I saw several suddenly look up from their intense study of the books to see why such a strange noise had come from a singer who had shown assured technical command throughout and whose voice otherwise had possessed an immensely comforting warmth of tone. 

Roger Vignoles had been working with the students over the days preceding the concert to encourage them to understand the complexities of a vocal recital beyond the mere technical aspects of voice control and projection.  A man whose understanding of singers and vocal presentations is second to none had considerable experience to share with these emerging voices, and many of them had clearly benefitted from this.  It would have been interesting to rip the books out of the audience’s hands and ask each time what they thought the song was about.  In some cases, I suspect nobody in the hall could have come close to guessing, but in others the meaning was clear merely through the posture, the vocal delivery, the facial expression and tiny but effective gestures from the individual singers.

Shubhangi Das was utterly in character as the ghostly revisitation in Berlioz’s Le spectre de la rose her voice portraying the uneasy, other-worldliness of the text, and her very posture interpreting the spirit of the words in a way no translation could ever come close; this was a highly effective delivery of one of the better known melodies in this all-French programme.  She also had a pleasing idiomatic feel to her French – even if one would have been hard-pressed to identify every single word. 

Even more impressive were Amelia Hayes, Alice Putri and Priscilla Fong who brought to life in a way which went far beyond mere singing, the very essence of their selected songs by, respectively, Chabrier, Chausson and Fauré.  We simply knew Hayes was telling us about fat and portly men, not just by the way she occasionally embraced an imaginary distended stomach, but through demonstrating an impressive level of vocal flexibility in making it actually sound fat and pompous.  Her French, too, had a strongly idiomatic feel to it.  Putri’s French took on a certain rustic quality, which was all part of a vividly compelling performance which was clearly telling us a funny tale about the simple country life.  Her amused and delighted demeanour was more vividly communicative of a mood than any mere words could convey.  Her extraordinarily powerful and beautifully controlled voice had that sense of arresting presence which is the mark of a true story teller.  Fong, graceful, poised and supremely confident caught the beautifully swaying feel of gently moving water in a particularly endearing and stylishly compelling account of Au bord de l’eau. If she can produce singing of this quality and exude such immense stage presence – in effect making these classic Fauré songs very much her own – at this early stage of her career, she surely has a great future ahead of her as a singer.

There were others, too, who brought their selected songs to life, not by the deliberate enunciation of texts as by immersing themselves so deeply in the spirit of the song that it flowed out of every aspect of their performance.  Jingyun Ng, and Jing Jie Lim were two superb singers whose performances impressed as being more than simple vocal presentations of what was written.  Sadly, however, I cannot enumerate every singer, every pianist or even identify every performance which impressed me in one way or another since there was one glaring omission from the heavyweight book all the audience had in their hands.  There was no list to tell us which singer was singing which song and with which pianist as their accompanist.