Low Notes 13
By David Ward
August 2019. This is the latest in an erratic series of newsletters about the choir that will include information about what we are singing plus irrelevant ramblings and observations from the back row of the basses.
First the important bit: practices for 2019-20 begin on Tuesday September 10. Please turn up 7.45pm to register and then we’ll start singing at 8pm as usual. And I’m sure Steve Thorpe would be pleased to have your £60 subs soon.
Unusually in this autumn session we have two performance events: in our St Cecilia’s Day concert on November 24, there are works by six composers. I’ve heard of five of them (including one Donald Judge) but Isabella Leornarda is a new one on me. Extensive research (ok, a quick flip through Wikipedia) tells me that she was born in 1620 and just 16 years later entered an Ursuline convent in Novara in the top left of Italy and stayed there until she died in 1704.
She seems to have begun composing when she was 20 but only really got cracking when she was 50; she eventually produced more than 200 works, which makes her one of the most prolific composing nuns of the baroque era. (Nuns in Italy seemed to spend a lot of time making music.)
On Sunday December 15 in a first for the choir, we’ll sing carols associated with fruit and flowers in a service of nine lessons and carols at St Oswald’s.
Our autumn non-performance event will be an informal singing morning in the Arts Centre on Saturday October 12. This is a chance for choir members to get together to sing shorter and relatively undemanding pieces purely for fun. And what we sing is up to you: just let Donald know what pieces you would like to share on the day.
The new year begins with a public singing day on Saturday March 14. It’s a chance for us to prepare Brahms’s A German Requiem for our concert performance of the piano duet version on Sunday June 14 and to invite other singers to join us for the day and perhaps permanently swell the choir’s ranks.
I’m very much looking forward to Dido and Aeneas on Sunday April 5, especially after hearing it in the parish church in Malton, North Yorkshire, during this year’s Ryedale Festival. And of course we had a taste at the Bolly Festival when Kathryn Rudge sang Dido’s lament with such feeling and we followed that with the sorrowing final chorus With Drooping Wings.
That night in the big top was quite an eventful one, not least because one false backward step by Donald would have seen him disappear off the stage. Then it rained and once that stopped the police helicopter started. Ambrose shot out from the bass ranks, apparently in search of a ground-to-air missile; when he couldn’t find one, he called the police and told them to shift the chopper. Which of course they did.
Then the glasses of our virtuosic pianist Duncan Glenday slid slowly down his nose during the final pages of a lusty Liszt operatic transcription and finally fell off as he hit the last crashing chord.
And we got through Mascagni’s Easter Hymn without messing it up.
The Bolly Flyer Roars Again had its world première at that concert but, reluctant to let it go off into the sidings, I thought it ought to be heard again. The plan was to sing it on August 2, exactly 150 years after the first train steamed into Bollington. And it had to be sung on the railway bridge.
Easy to say but problematical to achieve; it would, after all, be a little impractical to shove a piano up on to the bridge. Then Val Cutter offered her keyboard. But how would we power it? Dangle a long lead from the Co-op? And would we need an amplifier? And wouldn’t we need some kind of tent to protect the keyboard in case of a downpour?
These unanswered questions bounced round my head until I gave up and settled on the Arts Centre which, after all, is pretty close to the bridge. Once Ambrose found a pianist and an extra tenor, the Flyer was set to roar again.
About 18 of us gathered (a day late for the precise 150th anniversary) on August 3. The sun shone. A few people turned up to listen and Deborah Roberts arrived with a car load of Macclesfield, Bollington and Marple railway cupcakes donated by Virgin Trains and left over from the unveiling on August 2 of a plaque on the Middlewood Way.
Steve Thorpe, in hi-viz jacket, led off with his solo and we sang the piece a couple of times. Since the sun was still shining, we staggered up on to the bridge with the keyboard and sang it again up there. Joggers, cyclists and dog walkers came by and every one of them pretended we were not there. They stared ahead and shot by as quickly as possible.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this daft project work.
Fired with the success of this bit of alfresco music making, I now fancy singing madrigals up by White Nancy at dawn on May Day next year. Any takers?
David