Over the weekend I attended two concerts. They could have been very similar; both
featured well-established choirs, both involved a small band of specialist
instrumentalists, both took place in churches and both featured sacred music with a Christmas
theme. There was even one piece of
music common to both.
But in actuality the two could hardly have
been more different, and that was largely down to the unique character of their
respective choral directors. Choral
directors are responsible for the sound the choir produces and the way they
deliver the music, for the musical insight shown in the performances, for the
overall choral balance and blend and for the way their choirs address the
audience from the stage (and we must consider church chancels as performance stages). Every Director does things differently, and
that personality informs the whole spirit of the concert for good or ill, especially
where the Director is a powerful personality.
Cappella Martialis is unique in the Singapore choral
scene in being a choir which concentrates exclusively on music from the middle
ages to the 17th century.
Their concerts are marked by intense scholarship and a thematic approach
which involves a single theme placed in a historical context. They are proud to describe themselves as HIP
(a handy acronym, much beloved by acronym-laden Singapore musicians, for Historical
Informed Performance) and certainly much attention is given to pronunciation of
the texts and the contextualizing of the music performed (see at the bottom of this post). On Saturday they were accompanied by a band of period
instrumentalists – including violas de gamba, recorders, theorbos and lutes –
in a programme recreating, as the concert title had it, “a German Baroque Christmas
c.1620”.
Those of us in the know attend a Cappella Martialis
concert for the music (and, it must be said, for the magnificently illustrated
and beautifully presented programme booklets – a mine of really fascinating historical
detail), but not for the quality of the music making. For one thing Cappella Martialis is not is a
polished, professional, technically adept choir: it is a bunch of dedicated enthusiasts
whose enthusiasm communicates itself sufficiently strongly to overcome the
frequent musical failings of their performance.
On Saturday we had our fair share of collapses, false starts,
breakdowns, distorted balance and wobbly intonation (in some cases pitch its
very self), at times the musicians seemed unsure of what they were supposed to do next
or where they should be standing, and at one point the concert was held up
while the organist searched around for his music. But all that caused little unease amongst the
listeners who were lapping up a wonderful and historically informed glimpse of
Lutheran music as it was (and, I suspect, as it sounded – warts and all) 400
years ago.
Appropriately the Cappella Martialis concert took
place in a Lutheran Church. However, as
we were told in the interesting pre-concert talk (a welcome feature of all Cappella
Martialis concerts), the Lutheran Church of 1620's Germany was very different from this
clean, modern, warm (hot) and airy 1966 Singapore building (complete with large cockroach
which crawled out mid-concert on to the wall above the choir to see what all
the fuss was about before scuttling back to its dark harbour), and that rather
negated the sense of context which might have come from using such a building.
(I found it oddly disturbing that I was sat next to a vast multi-channel mixing
desk, implying that the amplification of sound has almost as much significance
to Singaporean Lutherans as the visual celebration of God. I hasten to add that
the mixing desk was not in use, and the sound the choir and instrumentalists produced
was easily audible on its own terms.)
I enjoyed it a lot, as did the large audience, and
once again I came away, not so much musically enriched, but with a feeling that
I understood a little more about German Lutheran music of the early 17th
century. But one of the Choral director’s
foibles annoyed me intensely. His choir
struggled hard and his musicians laboured with devotion to bring the music
across to the audience, who responded after each item with plenty of generous and
sincere applause. Yet choral director Yeo
Ying Hao studiously refused to acknowledge any of this. As we showed our appreciation
he kept his back firmly turned on us and shuffled his music or got his choir to
move around as if we simply did not exist.
I found that rude. And to
compound the affront, at the very end when Yeo did, eventually turn round to
face us, instead of acknowledging our applause, he raised his hands and flipped
his wrists in that kind of faintly dismissive gesture so many Choral Directors have
got into the habit of doing so that the singers all bow together. I hate this.
In the world of orchestral playing, the conductor acknowledges the
applause on behalf of his musicians; Choral Directors who so obviously instruct
their singers to do the bowing seem to imply that they, as Directors, are in
some way above the mucky business of pandering to an audience. It looks horrible, for not only is the
wrist-flipping gesture capable of mis-interpretation as a rude gesture aimed at the audience,
but while it may get all the choral heads bowing simultaneously, it does not
bring them back up together. The ensuing
staggered re-erection of necks is made all the more ragged by the emphasis on
precision in the initial bow.
On Sunday it was the turn of the Cathedral Choir of
the Risen Christ which was formed in 1970 and has now grown to become one of
the most impressive church choirs in Singapore.
They were on their home turf - the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd – for their
traditional annual Christmas Presentation at which, as the years have gone by,
more and more members of the diplomatic community have seen fit to attend. On Sunday night no less than 40 ambassadors, high commissioners,
or representatives of various embassies attended, along with a Singapore government
minister and a huge, capacity audience.
In honour of these diverse national representatives, the choir sang at least one item in each of the
national languages; a feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that they
did it entirely from memory and (I was reliably informed by any of the national
representatives I met at the post-concert reception) had been trained to get the pronunciation
and accents just right. By request,
apparently, they had been asked not to sing in Ukrainian, and since Kazakhstan
appears to have no suitable Christmas music of its own, a piece of Gregorian
chant sung in Latin was used instead; much to the considerable amusement of the
country’s ambassador and his loquacious wife, who were sitting right in
front of me. Also in front of me was the
South African ambassador who clearly loved every single minute of the presentation
and seemed almost uncontainably enthused by the choir’s wonderfully invigorating
singing of a song from his own country (Bayété!,
Bayété! – I’m not
sure in which of the South African languages that is). As if the huge musical repertory (64
individual pieces sung over the course of two and a half hours) and range of languages
was not enough, most were performed with some suitable prop and/or costume, and
often with some exquisitely choreographed dancing from a choir which showed themselves
not just to be musically adept but tremendously accomplished
all-round-performers. This truly is a wonderful choir, capable, talented, musical and drilled to state of near perfection by their dedicated and deeply committed Choral Director
The first half of the concert was a celebration of
Singapore’s bicentenary (why is everyone calling it a “Bicentennial”?) and this
was where some of the more “serious” (for want of a better word) music was
presented. There was a wonderfully
buoyant performance of “God rest ye Merry Gentlemen”, a searingly gorgeous
performance of Poulenc’s Quem vidistis
and a surprisingly moving performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Pié Jesu. I was deeply impressed by a beautiful Irish
carol (“Carol from an Irish Cabin”) by Dale Wood which I had not heard before, despite
having spent six unforgettable years living in Ireland, and I even found the obligatory
performance of Dick Lee’s “Home” quite touching. The towering success of the first half has to
have been an absolutely riveting performance of Adiemus by Karl Jenkins which transcended the usual glib rhythmic
delivery and became something of real musical substance. Other gems from the concert included a rich
performance of Rachmaninov’s Bogoróditse
Dyevo, a lovely performance of the Swedish Santa Lucia, a magical performance, complete with dimmed lights and
ersatz candles, of Stille Nacht, and a
hugely effective Jordanian carol Ya Mariamo
el Bekro fokti. Germany was
represented by Praetorius’s Es ist ein
Ros in a performance as polished and historically inauthentic as Cappella
Martialis’s performance of it the night before was not. Among the instrumental
support were various ethnic instruments from south east Asia which proved to be
hugely effective, even out of context, and the whole presentation was adorned
by a continually changing series of PowerPoint slides projected on to the wall
behind the choir. No space for any cockroaches
here! Among the large and intensely loyal choral members are
a body of really young singers obviously well below the age of 8; under which, according
to the concert notices, no child was to be admitted. While this handful of tiny children elicited
the necessary “ah” factor from admiring adults, they actually delivered their
solos (in very strange languages from them) with impressive confidence and security.
Choral Director, Peter Low is supremely gifted in the art of stage presentation, and the fact
that this was such a slick, polished and absorbing performance which ran without a single obvious hitch, is
entirely down to his leadership. But he
is not without his own minor but nevertheless irritating and distracting
foibles. He has an almost obsessive
sense of performance control which occasionally becomes counter-productive; attempting to slow down the person announcing
the members of the diplomatic corps in procession, he waved his hand so grandly that it
stopped one ambassador in his tracks. Low is too accomplished a choral director and
performer to make the mistake of waving his wrists about to get the choir to
move collectively, but his way of doing it is equally disturbing; he claps his hands sharply. The first time I heard this I thought he had
lost his temper and was admonishing an errant singer - and I lost the next few
pieces in the performances while I strained my memory to try and work out who
and what had gone wrong. It eventually
dawned on me that it was his way of getting them to move together, but in a
concert, like this one, which celebrates peace, this almost rifle-like retort
is deeply disturbing. Perhaps a
little bell would achieve the same effect on the choir with rather less of a
disturbance to the audience; and would turn a necessary instruction into an integral part of the performance.
Choral Director foibles aside, both concerts were in
their own way hugely impressive, and I only wish I had seen in the audiences
more of Singapore’s musical fraternity (although a notable presence at the Sunday event was Singapore's great musical luminary, Bernard Tan - whose lovely setting of "The Peace of God" was included in the concert). They would have learnt something from
both, be it an insight into 17th century German music or 200 plus
years of Singapore history as revealed through music.
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| A taste of the historical detail to be found in a Capella Martialis programme book - would that more of Singapore's musical groups took so much care over their own programme book |
