A Tale of Two Concerts

The first was at Cadogan Hall last Tuesday:

It featured three choral pieces, all of which I have sung both with my choir  and with others. The first two were short pieces, interspersed in the first half with two familiar orchestral pieces – Vaughan Williams's Toward the Unknown Region and his Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus ...

<parenthesis>
(and while we're on the subject, I do wish those people on Classic FM would stop using the inappropriate Romish pronunciation. In the speech of Vaughan Williams [who studied Latin before the vogue for Italianate pronunciation in choral works] the stressed vowel in Dives [as also in Benedicite] was the very English diphthong /ɑɪ/)
</parenthesis>

...as I like to think of it Variations on The Star of the County Down).

<note type="obituary">
Incidentally, RIP Paddy Moloney, who plays on that track.
</note>

The other orchestral piece was Ravel's Pavane pour une infante ...

<more_Classic_FM_snobbery>
NOTHING TO DO WITH CHILDREN FOR PETE'S SAKE. An Infante can be any age. The present Infanta Elena, for example, is in her late fifties; and the Infanta Eulalia died in her 95th year. Catherine Bott, the other week, said the music conjured up the image  of a "young princess". (Well they were all young once of course, but never princesses.)

Not that that matters. According to the program notes. Ravel had no image in mind, and just liked the sounds. (And I suspect the reason for that was the three distinct nasals [not just two, as it would be if the infante was just a child.)
</more_Classic_FM_snobbery>

...défunte.

The other  choral piece was Fauré's charming Cantique de Jean Racine, written...

<PROGRAMME_NOTE exception="not last Tuesday's though">
when (as programme notes insist on saying he entered it for a "school prize". Sometimes they even say 'when he was only a schoolboy!!!' [if you'll pardon the screamer-orrhea]. But he was not a schoolboy in the Just William sense; he was nineteen, studying at the École Niedermeyer de Paris,)  

More here 

</PROGRAMME_NOTE>

And here's an extract from something I wrote a few years ago (not essential reading but quite fun, I think  –  though I say it as shouldn't):

<2015_quote>
[In the Cantique] The basses sing Dissipe le sommeil [... ⇦ NB] languissante qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois. 

I've sung this piece many times [see here for a rantette], but only recently I started to think about gender. There was no feminine noun that the object pronoun la could refer to. If the thing that was the object of conduit was sommeil then the  languissante shouldn't have its feminine ending, and the la conduit should be l'a conduit – so that it's not an admission of weakness but a confession of past sins.

This seemed to me to be a great dis-covery – all those editors had got it wrong; I started sharpening my mental pencil, in preparation for a letter to the publishers of European Sacred Music. After all, the editor was John Rutter,  and I had a history of textual nit-picking with him:

But look back at that NB a couple of paragraphs back. Before writing my planned letter I checked the score, and realized my potentially embarrassing mistake: the basses don't sing all the words. The upper parts sing the whole sentence:

Dissipe le sommeil d'une âme languissante 

Qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois!

Oh well.... 

More here 
</2015_quote>

But the main choral offering was Fauré's Requiem. The choir (the excellent City of London Choir, whose diction outdid the soloist in my favourite part of the Libera Me.

<parenthesis type="distance between heaven and earth">
Their double /t/ and rolled r in et terra was momentous (portentous?... one of those -entous words anyway); whereas the soloist was less percussive (while philologically more sympathetic – think of the Italian e [sometimes i], the Spanish y  [sometimes e], the french et (where the written t is just an orthographic convention, and doesn't resurface [as does the last consonant of est] even before a vowel...

<autobiographical_note >
I remember a sixties classmate making the unnecessary elision, so that the Claude Lelouch film acquired the surprising title "A man is a woman" (a fore-runner of The Danish Girl, perhaps).
<autobiographical_note>

...). 

The rest of this parenthesis is eminently skippable. The concert just brought it to mind.  

I wrote some time ago (here) about the musical difference between heaven and hell:

Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of Libera me [part of his Requiem].

Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...

The words are describing the Day of Judg-ment: Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.' 

But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom. 

††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

</parenthesis>

Whether by accident (Covid-spacing) or design, the idea to put the Soprano in the gallery for the Pie Jesu was well-judged – a mixture of the angelic and the celestial – though I did wonder how they'd coordinate her curtain call: a system of wires up the staircase, carrying a silent message?  An SMS?

<note type="Health & Safety">
In the event, she came down onto the main stage; I trust she wasn't wearing heels, though she did have three numbers to negotiate all those stairs.
</note>

The concert was conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton, who I first heard of a few years ago (probably more like ten, in view how fast time flies for the septuagenarian) presenting the sadly short-lived Masterworks programme on Classic FM. It was axed (or at least not recommissioned) after one or two series...

<parenthesis subject="Masterworks">
This was an educational programme aired on Sunday afternoon, based on the GCSE music syllabus (in those halcyon pre-Gove days when more than a handful of children still studied music at school). 

<inline_ps> 

Since taking this fairly off-hand swipe at the Coalition Government's introduction of the eBacc in 2010, I have been feeling the need for some documentary backing. Well here it is. And here's a pretty telling graph from the article:

Moreover, the report adds 

A similar pattern was shown even more starkly in last week’s A Level results, when Music A-Level students were revealed to have halved in the last decade, falling from around 10,000 to around 5,000 a year.

(Of course, as this was in August 2020, there had been especial problems of access to music facilities/hands-on teaching.  Home schooling, anyone? Still...). 

<inline_ps>

<parenthesis>

... He was having a whale of a time, waving his arms like Mick Jagger. It was clear that he had sorely missed music-making and was making up for lost time.

The second of my two concerts – Kevin Loh at King's Place  – is in doubt. We may not go.

<rant>
And I'm sick of this Trump-like insistence on politicizing the wearing of masks. latest example of this was in Giles Coren's piece in The Times last Saturday "Done The Times, now I need to do the crimes" – all the more insidious because of its puerile resentful acquiescence (more befitting William Brown than a grown-up like Mr Coren): "I wear a mask on the tube because Sadiq Khan says I must" (or words to that affect).

I quote from the TfL conditions of carriage, section 2.4:

Given the coronavirus pandemic, all passengers over the age of 11 years must wear a face covering when travelling on our services, until further notice.

You must wear a face covering when in our bus and rail stations, on our platforms, Emirates Air Line terminals and river piers and on our bus, tram, train, Emirates Air Line, Dial-a-Ride and Woolwich ferry services.

Your face covering must cover from the top of your nose to the bottom of your chin, and attach behind your ears or tie behind your head, unless you are exempt from this requirement.

If you are not exempt and you fail to comply with this requirement or directions given by an authorised officer, you may not be allowed entry or may be asked to leave our premises.

Nothing to do with Sadiq Khan, although being a responsible adult, rather than a smart-arse  overgrown public schoolboy,  he approves. This is not the overweening nanny state, it's a simple capitalist contract: you ride our network, you wear a mask: that's the deal. And the mealy-mouthed TfL announcement that says "some people may  have difficulty wearing masks" is plain risible. Some people can't wear masks; nobody "has difficulty" wearing them; a little inconvenience maybe.

<hindsight>
I can't help thinking of male surgeons spreading puerperal fever  by not washing their hands when leaving autopsies to go to a maternity ward; today we can't believe anyone would be so stupid, but then there was huge resistance (especially among privileged men) to what we see today as simple hygiene. Similarly in a few years, with hindsight, it will be impossible to fathom how stupid it was not to wear masks.
</hindsight>

It's not politics; it's hygiene.  I wish entertainment venues followed TfL's lead  and made mask-wearing a contractual obligation

</rant>

But I must "tread upon the ground" (as Old Daddy Fox used to say (or maybe I'm thinking of a similar song  – anyway time for my rehearsal).

Update 2021.10.23.14:05 – Added <inline_PS />