The LCS blog

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….

Guiseppe Verdi

As you know if you read my first blog, Leatherhead Choral Society, in conjunction with our friends from three other choirs, are tackling the choral monument that is Verdi’s Requiem. In further blogs I’ll be talking about all the activities that are going on but first I thought I should set the scene a bit.

If you had looked up Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi on Wikepeida as I  just did then you would  know he died in 1901 at the age of 88. His first opera (Oberto if you must know) was produced at La Scala when he was 26 and his last opera, (Falstaff) when he was 80. His final composition, the Stabat Mater, (published as one of his late “Four Sacred Pieces”) was written just four years before his death.

His  Requiem which luckily for me also gets a page to itself in Wikipedia, was first performed in Milan in May 1874 when Verdi was 61, with the composer himself conducting. So it is a mature, but not a late, work by Verdi’s standards.  After several very successful early performances it disappeared from the repertoire until it was revived in the 1903s to emerge as one of the most popular pieces of classical music.

The Requiem lasts about 90 minutes in performance and is usually performed on its own in a concert, which is what we are doing. Its popularity must stem from the glorious melodies, exciting rhythms and the stunningly dramatic nature of the music which make it one of the most operatic pieces of concert music ever written.

One of the problems of performing the work is finding a venue big enough to hold the enormous forces required. Apart from the four soloists and huge choir required it needs 12 woodwind players, 16 brass players, 2 percussionists and as many string players as the conductor can shake his stick at. For this performance are using a slightly reduced orchestration performance version prepared by Ian Bauers. This is partly to cut down on costs and partly so that we can fit all the performers on the stage of our chosen venue, the beautiful GLive in Guildford.

Even with the reduced forces, it’s going to be a snug fit.

Choral Societies have been around in the UK for a long time. Many of the oldest ones date from the excitement generated by the Handel commemoration in 1784.

Leatherhead is quite a bit younger than that – we were founded in 1928 to take part in the Leith Hill Musical Festival in Dorking. And for many years I think competing in the Festival was just about all the society did in an average year. Things are very different now, what with concerts in the summer and autumn, Christmas concerts, workshops, charity concerts and on and on…

But this autumn we’re taking on our biggest challenge yet. On November 24th we’re teaming up with three other choirs – Horsley and Oxshott Choral Societies and Concordia Singers – to tackle Verdi’s Requiem in the brand new 700-seater GLive in Guildford. The orchestra will be the wonderful English Festival Orchestra and we’ve got some wonderful soloists lined up.

But have we bitten off more than we can chew? Can we pull it off? That’s what this blog is going to be all about. As they say: Watch this space…