The LCS blog

Well. That’s that, then.

I bet you would like to know – how did it go?

It went well. Very well.

But that doesn’t begin to describe it. It was, undoubtedly, the most emotionally uplifting, and exhausting, couple of hours of music making I’ve ever been involved in. When you study and rehearse, and practice a piece for many hours you start think you know it, and understand it. But sometimes, when a performance takes wing, you realise you didn’t understand it at all before, because the drama, the power of the music lies somewhere beyond the notes on the page, in the experience of making it.

That’s not to say the performance was technically perfect – sure there were a few little things. But that’s not the point. The point was the immediacy, the commitment, the emotion and the drama.

The English Festival Orchestra, were terrific. The soloists were superb. The choir sang out of their skins. Really I couldn’t have asked for more.

Usually as a conductor it’s hard to let go because you’re concentrating so hard on making sure everything hangs together. But then sometimes, when you are surrounded by wonderful musicianship, you can let go and just wallow in the illusion that the music is magically coming out of your fingers, that you’re somehow playing all the instruments and singing all the parts. That’s what it felt like most of the time last night, and I found it a rather surreal, and at times almost overwhelming, experience.

I’m sorry if that description sounds rather breathless and overblown but, honestly, if you’d been standing where I was standing, you’d be feeling shellshocked too.

So yes, it went well. Very well. Thanks for asking.

Golly when when I said “Let’s do the Verdi Requiem in November next year” I didn’t actually think ‘November next year’ would really come.

And yet, here we are.

Today is Thursday and the concert’s on Saturday. Eek – two more sleeps.

So what have I forgotten to do? I really can’t think of anything. I’ve studied the full score until my eyes crossed; I’ve prepared seating plans for the choir and for the orchestra; I’ve meticulously planned the afternoon rehearsal so it doesn’t go over 3 hours;  I’ve rehearsed with the soloists (Oh my God that was so cool and such fun) and I’ve even bought some little battery-powered lights in case the offstage trumpets can’t see their music.  For heavens sake, I’ve even got change for the car park (come on, Guildford, £1.10 an hour?, are you kidding?) and I’ve bought a new high-collar black shirt to go with my cool conductor Nehru jacket. I’ve sharpened my special Four Choirs Verdi Requiem commemoration pencil and polished my baton until it glows (actually that last one may not be true).

I’ve considered the stage layout from every angle – can the choir see me? can the audience see the choir? can the soloists see each other? can the leader of the first violins see the leader of the second violins? Can the bass drum player see past the double basses? And on and on.

So what on earth have I forgotten? We all know there’s going to be something. If it was a picnic it would be the corkscrew. If it was a holiday it would be my swimming trunks.

Well, whatever it turns out to be, I guess I’ll have to let you know it after Saturday. What I do know is that everyone’s really, really exited and up for it. It’s going to be great.

Oh PS we’ve sold almost ALL THE TICKETS! So I haven’t, after all, bankrupted four choral societies with my crazy scheme. Hah!

Here we are already. Middle of September, couple of rehearsals under the belt, and what did we learn? Apart from some of the notes, I mean?

• We learned that people will come and sing in your choir if it’s the Verdi Requiem because, well, who doesn’t like singing the Verdi Requiem? We’ve got some lovely new members who we hope will stay long after the echoes of the Verdi performance have died away. So that’s good.
• We learned that, just as we knew all along, it really is a fabulous piece without a single boring movement with a constant flow of great melodies and strong emotions. So that’s good too.
• We learned that it’s really hard to get the balance right in the 8-part fugue bits and even harder for the conductor to remember which bit of the room he’s meant to point at at any given moment.. Hmm. Working on it.
• We learned that top B is an awfully high note for the sopranos. Working on that too.
• We learned that making great music together is just about the bestest, funnest, most rewardingest thing you can do.
• We learned that the Ricordi edition really is terrible. Why would they go on reprinting the same stupid typos over and over again in every edition of a piece for 138 years? Why? Why?
• I mean even Novello realised eventually that it wasn’t good enough to just make a few prints with half a potato, bung a blue cover on it and start charging people. Even they turned over a new leaf and started putting out really accurate, readable editions.
• With bar numbers.
• I mean, come on, Ricordi, what’s the matter  with you?
• Mind you, they’re better than Kalmus

Oh hang on sorry I seem to have got sidetracked. I don’t know what came over me then.

But I mean, honestly.

So here we are, summer holidays (yay!) which means as the conductor I’ve finally got time to do some serious preparation on the score. Of course I sort of knew the work, or I thought I did, but not to anything like the level of detail required to direct a performance of it. So I thought since I’m meant to be getting on with that, and since its rather daunting, I would waste time on this blog instead and tell you what I’m supposed be to doing, which is even more fun than actually doing it …

I remember reading a quote from Daniel Barenboim. Someone asked him how long it takes to learn a score. His answer: “a lifetime”. Which is profoundly true but at the same time not terribly helpful. I think of it this way: A conductor has to know the work so well that he or she can answer any question about the music, and have a good reason for all his decisions about the musical interpretation. Where can the altos breath in this section? How do you pronounce “Resurget”? Shouldn’t that tenor note be a quaver rather than a crotchet? And on and on. It’s painstaking, intensive and fascinating work, peeling back the layers of the music, trying to get at the composer’s intentions and think lofty thoughts whilst getting stuck in to the nitty gritty of phrasing, orchestration, dynamics, articulation and so on.

Then there’s the whole question of the style. Verdi is a romantic Italian opera composer and this has implications with respect to many details of interpretation, not least flexibility of pulse, so-called rubato. Where does the music hold back a little, where does it push on? Most listeners will be unaware of the myriad of small adjustments to speed that must be made, especially during the solo moments, but all listeners will recognise instinctively whether the music feels alive, organic and involving or rigid and somehow cold.

And that’s before you think about how you’re going to wave your arms around – or to put it more grandly, beat patterns and gestures. It sounds like an obvious thing to say but since a conductor must communicate with the performers entirely through gesture they all have to be thought about and rehearsed, and exactly repeatable, whilst leaving a little bit of leeway for the inspiration and excitement of the moment. It might, and hopefully will, look spontaneous but a conductor in a performance rarely makes an unrehearsed gesture during a performance.

So perhaps you’ll excuse me: I had better be getting on with it.

Big, long meeting the other night at Helen’s house. But when the dust had settled we found the programme was all sorted out. Well almost. Lot’s of discussion because it has to be a really nice one for this gig – A4, full-colour, proper printing. Not one of your thrown-together-at-the-last-minute-and-photocopied-at-work jobs you sometimes get. Not bloomin’ likely.

We’ve figured out what’s got to go in it, we’ve got some advertising lined up, although we need more now because we just decided to add another 4 pages so we could spread ourselves out a bit and not look too cramped. There’s a great team (yes a whole team) working on the programme and I’m really excited to see how it comes out.

We’ve got the flyers too, which look really, really nice. Oh silly me I was forgetting, this is the internet – you already know what they look like – there’s one on this very page.

Oh and the other exciting thing that has happened since my previous blog is that tickets have gone on sale.   You can buy them online in a cool, moderny sort of way. That’s how cool and modern we are on this project. Better hurry though because, to our intense delight, they’re going fast!

I promised to talk about the reduced orchestration we’ll be using for this project and I thought I’d take advantage in a bit of a lull in activities over Easter to do just that.

Verdi’s original orchestration calls for around 55 players: 11 woodwind, 16 brass (including 8 trumpets and one, virtually obsolete, ophicleide), 2 percussion players and let’s say around 25-30 strings to balance them. It’s a big band, and impractical for a lot of amateur choral societies to employ.

Because of the popularity of the work, however,  there are other options available. I’m aware of three freely available alternative orchestrations, although I have no doubt there are others out there, and presumably many more if you count arrangements made for specific events but not otherwise actively promoted.

David Meacock, founder of the A40 Choir has made many orchestrations and arrangements including both The Dream of Gerontius and the Verdi. His approach is probably more suited to a performance in a large church or cathedral as it substitutes organ for all the wind players, as well as cutting down on the number of brass and percussion required.

What about the offstage trumpet effect in the Dies Irae? I hear you cry. In an ingenious move, Meacock explains that “The effect can be imitated to a degree by hanging a deep pile rug or thick winter coat over the back of a chair near the music stand, and placing the trumpet’s bell very close to the material so as to produce a muffled sound.” I love the idea of the last trump being played into the back of an old duffle coat.

The composer and arranger Rowland Lee, an old friend, also has a version. This uses scored for 6 woodwind, 7 brass, percussion and strings, and I’m sure would be ideal for those looking for a scaled-down version but with, as near as possible, the original sounds.

In this performance we will be using a fairly new version by Ian Bauers, an arranger who has made a speciality of this type of work, having already completed versions of The Creation, The Seasons, Elijah, and Mozart’s Requiem. He has taken the lightest touch of the three, mainly just reducing the requirements for the wind players. His version requires 6 woodwind, 9 brass, percussion and strings (we’re using 8 first violins, 6 seconds, 4 violas, 4 cellos and 2 double basses) – 41 players in total. It’s still a big band and will make a stupendous noise when required, but it’s more affordable, and means that we may have a fighting chance of fitting all the performers onto the stage (we hope). I’ve heard a recording made a the first performance of this version and I have to say that it’s been cleverly done and the differences will certainly not be apparent to most listeners.

Right, then, let’s talk about money. It’s a subject that’s bound to come up sooner or later when someone says “Let’s do the Verdi Requiem”. Because, let’s face it – whatever happens, it’s not going to be a cheap concert.

First of all, the work requires a large, romantic, orchestra. That means you need a pretty decent sized choir (so they can be heard) not to mention four generously-lunged (read “expensive”) soloists. And that means you’re looking for a large venue. And that’s before you think about the music hire costs.

I think it’s fair to say that the initial reactions of the Leatherhead Choral Society committee to my suggestion of the Verdi spanned a wide range, but, bless their cotton socks, they didn’t shoot it out of the water and the more they thought about it the more it seemed like we might, just be able to pull it off provided we could find the right collaborators who were prepared to shoulder some of the financial responsibility, and provided we all had enough support from our choirs.

I’ve recorded elsewhere in my bloggerings how lucky we were to forge a great relationship with the other choirs, who quickly became completed equal partners in the venture, and also the wonderful lady who conducts two of them and who immediately got excited about the project when she was first approached, gosh, almost exactly a year ago now.

The biggest expenses are of course the venue and the orchestra, but by using a reduced orchestration (about which more in my next bit of bloggery) we’ve managed to tame the second item somewhat. However the work still demands a top-notch band, perhaps even more so since each player is relatively more exposed than in the original version, and we are very lucky to have obtained the services of a very fine orchestra, the English Festival Orchestra (founded by Trevor Ford), which knows a thing or two about playing for choral concerts being effectively the house bands for, among other things, the Leith Hill Musical Festival and The Really Big Chorus concerts in the Albert Hall.

The treasurers of all four choirs have spent ages poring over spreadsheets to come up with a really tight budget, so that we could answer some basic questions like: “what should the ticket price be?” and “how many tickets do we have to sell to avoid complete financial ruin for our choirs”. It seems like we’re going to need to sell between 2 and 3 tickets for every person in the combined choirs, which seems like a reasonably ambitious, but not totally ridiculous target, being the sort of proportion we would hope to achieve on a normal concert. Looking at it that way seems to make it seem a lot less scary than just stating the total number of tickets.

By the way – for another overview of the project, do check out my blog on the wonderful ChoirPlace website.

 So,  loyal readers, if any, there was a big meeting of the organising committee last evening. Yes, I know how uninteresting that sounds, and yes, you’re right, it was all the usual stuff: publicity, programmes, ticket prices, budgets and so forth. Well I say “the usual stuff” as if we all organise concerts like this every second week but the truth is I’m not sure anyone involved has been involved in organising anything this big and complicated and expensive before (although my daughter’s wedding runs it a close second I suppose.) All of which goes towards explaining the air of quiet purposeful excitement bubbling not far below the surface of a meeting that, the way I’ve described it, should have been rather mundane and dull. It really wasn’t.

Part of the reason everyone’s having so much fun is definitely a sense of joy in being involved in a shared project that brings together four otherwise quite separate choirs, two of which more commonly meet in the competition arena at Leith Hill. Collaboration, if you have good collaboratees, is terrific.

Also hidden in the excitement, to be frank, is a certain amount of barely contained trepidation. This is driven by a recognition that there’s an awful lot of money at stake. All the choirs have shown enormous commitment to this project and an optimism and belief which in these penny-pinching times seems to have rather gone out of fashion, but there’s no ignoring the fact that this is a high stakes game for charitable organisations that normally operate on a much smaller scale.

But we don’t dwell too much on the fear aspect of the thing. Instead we talked happily and excitedly about radio interviews, sellling advertising space, distributing leaflets, whether to have a retiring collection, whether to have a “launch party” for the project (answer: yes) and if so when (answer: Sept 1st) and where (answer: er…hmm). On the musical side we chatted about the English Festival Orchestra (of which more in a later blog) and the soloists (ditto) and the combined rehearsal and the Ricordi edition and the Performing Arts Library and, oh gosh I don’t know what else. I can see I’m boring you now but honestly it was just all great because everyone is just so up for it. You should have seen their little faces. Mine too.

But nobody left the meeting in any doubt about one thing: we’ve got to sell tickets. Lots and lots of them. Really lots. And to do that we need to get several hundred other people as excited and fired up about this project as the folks on the committee. So how about it, dear reader? Anything stirring yet?

Alessandro Manzoni

Just allow me one last  blog on the background to the Verdi Requiem and then I’ll shut up about that. It’s just that it turns out to be more interesting than I expected. Or perhaps I just need to get out more.

Anyhow, as I mentioned in my last blog, Verdi’s Requiem, or to give it its official title “Messa da Requiem per l’anniversario della morte de Manzoni, 22 Maggio 1874″ was written as a personal reponse to the death of one of Verdi’s great idols, the poet Alessandro Manzoni, author of the popular novel I promessi sposi (“The Betrothed”).

Verdi revered Manzoni and was deeply saddened by his death so it is no surprise that he wanted to honour him in some way through his music. It is possibly a tad strange though that he chose to write a requiem mass to do this. Manzoni was deeply religious but Verdi himself was agnostic – his wife thought him an atheist who laughed at her when she spoke of religion.  Verdi of course was known as an opera composer – he had written no sacred music before, apart from his contribution to the Rossini requiem project. One can only speculate on Verdi’s reasons for trying his hand at a full-scale sacred work at this time: it may be that he felt this was simply a fitting way to commemorate his hero, or that he sensed an opportunity to salvage something from the work he had put into the Rossini requiem. It may even be that there were commercial considerations involved. But whatever his reasons it seems clear that Verdi used the opportunity of working with the familiar sacred text to explore some of his own ambivalent attitude towards the power of prayer.

But back to the present. With luck and a following wind we will shortly be unveiling the design for the posters and flyers for this concert. Followers of this blog will see them first…..

When another great Italian opera composer, Gioachino Antonio Rossini, died on 13th November 1868 the 55-year old Verdi proposed a tribute. This was to be a Requiem for Rossini to be performed on the first anniversary of his death featuring music by 13 Italian composers.

The music was all written but the performance was cancelled due to a failure of organisation, or as Norbert Chrsten puts it “the performance foundered on personal vanities and incompetence”.

The Requiem for Rossini was not performed at all until 1988 and was not heard in the UK until 2003. Apart from Verdi himself the contributors to the work are mostly fairly obscure which could help to explain the relative lack of interest in the fate of this project. However we have reason to be glad that Verdi proposed the idea for at least one reason: the final section of the work, the Libera Me movement, which Verdi himself contributed, survives in his own Messa da Requiem written following death of the poet Alessandro Manzoni five years later.

“Tell us about Alessandro Manzoni” I hear you beg. OK I will, soon.

Just wait while I look him up….