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.
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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.
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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.
Love the pompous auctioneers ! Sounds like a wonderful booklet of surreal poetry, with a concert thrown in for free.
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