Is it Christmas already?

Well, obviously, no it isn't. But at choir rehearsal tonight we started practising for the carol service, which makes Christmas seem terrifyingly close!

A lot of the music is, of course, very familiar - it would be a very disappointing carol service that didn't include Hark, The Herald Angels Sing and O Come, All Ye Faithful - but among the pieces that I hadn't heard before is this absolutely gorgeous one:



Isn't it just glorious? The serenity! The simplicity of the line! The harmonies! Morten Lauridsen is an American composer (of Danish parentage), born in 1943, and this particular piece was written in 1994, but I'm pretty sure he's got the staying power of Tallis and Byrd.

Dona Eis Requiem

Today is All Souls' Day, which we commemorated at church this evening with a performance of Fauré's Requiem. Fabulous piece of music, and as a viola player I can only approve of a score with divided violas and cellos and only one violin :-) This time, though, I was singing alto - the Offertoire is our big moment, but my favourite section is the Libera Me.

Apart from a couple of wobbly moments - mainly due to not having enough rehearsal with the orchestra, I think - it went pretty well this evening. I enjoyed it, anyway!

Jazz à l'ancienne

Ancienne Belgique is one of Brussels', and possibly Belgium's, best concert venues. It's right in the centre of town, and hosts a wide variety of contemporary music - not just rock and pop bands, but jazz, folk, hip-hop and others as well - and also arranges a number of free open-air gigs during the summer.

Lisa Ekdahl is a Swedish jazz singer/songwriter, who sings mostly in Swedish, but sometimes in English. She has a very delicate, almost child-like voice - very unlike the great jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, but really very evocative, both in her own songs and in the jazz standards.

And on Sunday evening, I went to see the latter in the former, and very much enjoyed it.

As some of you know, I am... let us say not well-disposed towards the Swedes at the moment, and I was unsure about whether to go to this gig - I love Lisa Ekdahl's music, but I didn't know whether I could cope with a whole evening of Swedish. As it turned out, though, that wasn't an issue as her set was entirely in English - which was actually a bit disappointing, because I love some of her Swedish stuff. She mostly sang songs from her albums When Did You Leave Heaven and Back To Earth, and most of them were wonderful - the only one that didn't work for me was Björk's It's Oh So Quiet, because she didn't make a real contrast between the quiet and loud parts, and I don't think the song is anywhere near as effective without it. Her Cry Me A River, though, was beautiful.

Polyphonic heaven

Last night I went to a fabulous concert by these people, in a beautiful chapel literally 3 minutes walk from my apartment. I think I could get used to this.

It was a concert of Tallis and Byrd - the doyens of English (and in particular English-language) choral music. Especially in a resonant acoustic like an old stone church, you can just shut your eyes and let the music wash over you. Heavenly!

The programme was mostly Latin music - Byrd's five part mass and Tallis's Lamentations of Jeremiah - and they also did four of Tallis's English motets.

And I note from the website that they're back in September. I might not be living round here by then (though you never know), but I'm already putting it in my diary.

Is it just me...

or was Norway's Eurovision song actually not that good? I mean, it wasn't bad (though I'm sure he was singing sharp for a lot of it), but 387 points seems a bit excessive.

Mystery music

Brighton Festival. Over three weeks of art, theatre, music, dance, discussion... Marvellous.

Pretty much on a whim, I went with a friend to see the Takàcs Quartet at the Corn Exchange. Because it was just a random impulse, neither of us paid much attention to what the music was going to be, and we couldn't be bothered to buy a programme, so we spent most of the concert 'blind', as it were, with no idea what we were listening to. It was quite an interesting experience. One of the pieces was Bartok's 4th String Quartet, which was written in 1927, but we both thought it was much more modern than that. I hadn't heard the piece before, and I'm not usually a great Bartok fan, but I liked it a lot, especially the slower third movement, which was very atmospheric. The other works were Haydn's last quartet, and Schumann's A minor quartet, so a real mixture of periods. I thought it worked very well as a programme, and they played it all very well - some quartets very much specialise in a particular period, and you can tell when they're out of their comfort zone, but the Takàcs seemed perfectly at home in classical, romantic and modern.

The Corn Exchange was a good venue for a chamber concert. It's quite a big hall, but the acoustic is very good - resonant, but clear, so the sound never got lost. I did think the sound of the viola got slightly lost at times, but I suspect that might just be my bias as a viola player showing.

And afterwards, we went to Terraces, and sat on the terrace looking out over the sea drinking our first Pimms of the summer. What a lovely way to spend a bank holiday Sunday.

Crucifying the Crucifixion

It's that time of year again, folks, when all the big choirs are singing a Bach Passion of one flavour or another, and all the choirs that can't quite cope with that are doing Stainer's Crucifixion. And this year, for the first time, I was in the choir stalls instead of the audience.

Actually, I should apologise for the post title, because we didn't crucify it at all: in fact, apart from a couple of slightly wobbly moments, it went very well. And that's the beauty of the Stainer: it was specifically written to be singable by an ordinary parish choir and accessible to an ordinary parish congregation, and it succeeds admirably in those aims. Yes, it's very much of its time, fairly dripping with syrup in places; yes, the libretto is, umm, not exactly the finest poetry the world has ever seen; and yes, it does drag terribly in places, at least at the speed Richard Hickox takes it in the HMV Classics recording. But God So Loved The World is an incomparably beautiful setting of a verse (John 3:16) that expresses the very essence of the Christian faith; the hymn tunes (particularly Cross of Jesus) have stood the test of time; and the all-male-voice setting of Jesus' final words is remarkably effective.

Tallis it ain't. But it does what it set out to do very well, and I for one am glad that it's still going strong.