Singing with the angels

On Saturday I took part in the first performance of There Was a Child by Jonathan Dove. I wrote about my feelings before the concert here. So how did it go? Well, don't ask me, read the review in yesterday's Times. Or click here for the online version.

But that's how it was for the reviewer, Geoff Brown. How was it for me? Exciting, thrilling, enjoyable. Nervewracking. I'd been worried about not being able to follow the conductor's beat, having had only one and a half rehearsals with him. We had a dress rehearsal on the afternoon of the performance - with the orchestra and soloists - and, yes, it was difficult. The orchestra was obviously well used to David Parry's style, and he didn't hang around. We'd been led to believe that the orchestra might slow things up a little, compared with the piano we'd had accompanying our rehearsals, but that was not the case. It wasn't really the speed which gave us problems, though: it was more the fiendishly complicated rhythms. The time signature was constantly changing: in one movement a big chunk had a different one for each bar! I mustn't hide behind excuses, though. I felt just a teeny bit under-rehearsed, and I think the same went for others in the choir. It was amazing to be singing with a top-class orchestra (the City of Birmingham Symphony).

Afterwards was somewhat anticlimactic: as I knew hardly any of the other singers there was no meeting up in the pub or going for a curry. Perhaps everyone else did! My parents and Jan had come to listen, so that was good.

I felt we'd "got away with it", but reading the review I'm not so sure now.

Here's an extract from the review:

... throbbing minimalist ostinatos; syncopated, ricocheting rhythms; catchy harmonic shifts; singable lines, much repeated. You think of Britten at times, plus early John Adams; but the fusion is authentic Dove, and it’s very familiar.

Had the work been shorter and less compartmentalised, the Dove manner might have generated bigger sparks. The premiere performance with the conductor David Parry and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra would certainly have benefited from punchier voices. Toby Spence and Mary Plazas hit the bull’s-eye with their solo stints — eloquent expressions of boyish abandon, the wonder of birth and a mother’s grief. But the Broadland Youth Choir and Hewett School Choir needed larger decibels, greater numbers, while the spirited folks of the Festival Chorus hadn’t the orchestra’s mastery of Dove’s galloping rhythms.

Even so, the piece’s big heart was always appealing. And where it mattered most, in the emotional climax, the Dove magic still worked. Spence’s tenor rose in ecstasy for the aviator-poet Magee’s sonnet High Flight, only for the chorus to tumble down, one sad monosyllable after another, in the elegy of the executed Tichborne. Well-chosen words; pointed notes; fervent performers. Impossible not to be moved.

Well, it moved me. I think it's great music, and it was fun to sing. There are still little bits of it buzzing around in my head.

And the title of this post? I was right at the very back of the choir, on a steeply raked platform, looking down on the orchestra, conductor and audience.