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Newsletter Sotto Voce 2014

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Interesting to look back at last year’s Sotto Voce to see that we were ‘basking in a barbecue summer’. All I can remember now was a steady downpour from September to April, but this summer has been just what we are always hoping for, glorious sunny days and long warm evenings, with languorous picnics in concert intervals. It’s just under a month now before we get together again for our 2014/5 season. The Annual General Meeting will as usual be at 7.30pm at Brampton Abbotts Primary School on Thurs 4th September. Having finished the business we shall have a convivial reunion with a glass of wine before repairing to our seats to sing through one of the numbers we have chosen for our Winter Concert which will be in Saint Mary’s on Saturday 8th November. At the AGM Clare will take us through the accounts for the year ended 11th July 2014 and these will show a marked reduction in cash held since the previous year. Then we had a cash reserve of approximately £6,500, but this was earmarked for purchasing outright the staging which we had been hiring from the Y-Zone, which had been acquired by our friends the Ross Baptist Church. In the event, Dennis negotiated a highly favourable price and the staging is now ours. We had always found that the 1m wide panels took us too far into the nave which was fine for concerts accompanied by organ or piano or small ensemble, but left far too little room for an orchestra of more than about twelve, plus up to four soloists. We therefore arranged a part-exchange with CPS Staging and to buy the necessary legs and rails to halve the width of the front three rows, thereby gaining 1,5m of space to our front. When it came to staging Haydn’s Creation in our Spring concert, the sixteen-strong orchestra, including timps and fortepiano, had plenty of room, together with three soloists and Russell conducting. The staging, which is now stored together with our library on the Chase Industrial Estate in Ross will stand us in good stead for years to come. The Open Rehearsal will be the week after the AGM, on Thursday 11th September. It will be publicised, but please ask as many musical friends as you can think of. In Memory On 10th September last year, soprano Alison Taylor died and we provided a small choir to sing Mendelssohn’s Lift thine eyes to the mountain from Elijah at her funeral. Alison, a PhD, was a medical writer and a strong and knowledgeable soprano who had been planning to retire to an island off the west coast of her native Scotland, but this was sadly not to be. She died quite suddenly, far too young and we shall miss her fine voice and relaxed charm. On the night of 2nd August, Elizabeth Price died in St Michael’s Hospice, after a return of the cancer which we had all thought she had beaten some years ago. Elizabeth, while undergoing the most debilitating courses of chemotherapy, insisted on attending rehearsals for as long as she could, and even attended the quiz night in March. She had so wanted to sing in The Creation and she attended the afternoon rehearsal, but found she was just too weak to sing in the performance. Elizabeth was a dynamic personality who, it will be remembered organised the successful raffle in 2012, at a time when our finances were under pressure, which raised over £1,500, thus enabling us to start the new season with a healthy credit balance. With Alison’s and Elizabeth’s passing we lose two of our brightest stars. Last Season We finished the season with an experiment, which was to return to The Larruperz Centre after a gap of many years, with A Night at the Opera. Having been advised about the deadening effect of curtains and flies when singing without microphones from anywhere upstage of the proscenium we placed the sopranos and altos on the front of the stage using elements of our staging. With tenors and basses placed in front of the stage, soloists Jennifer Walker and Peter Wilman stood to sing on Ivor’s boxes, and John Merrick accompanied all on the piano, with pages ably turned by Alison Stafford. The hall was laid out ‘cabaret style’ with tables and the bar was open. It was gratifying to see new faces in the audience and the enthusiasm with which they applauded was evidence enough to suggest that the experiment had been a success which would be worth repeating. What should not be forgotten was the hard work by Dennis and Julie and their helpers, in first of all working out how it should all be set up and not least in the carrying of the grand piano up the back staircase. For the first time for many years, we decided to dispense with a carol concert, bearing in mind the number of such events crowding December, and the need to start rehearsing Haydn’s Creation for performance on 8th March. In the event this turned out to be a triumph, with entries all spot-on and dynamics well controlled. The soloists, Lucy Bowen soprano, Peter Wilman tenor and Jimmy Holliday bass, all gave superb performances in the solos and ensembles which are such a feature of this wonderful work. The week after The Creation, Mary Walton organised a successful and convivial Quiz Night at The Red Lion Peterstow, which, together with the concert raffles raised over £900. An overheard remark suggested that it would have been even more convivial had it not been held in Lent. Next Season This will be Russell’s third season as our conductor and musical director, and now we know each so well, we can look forward to a very rewarding season. The first concert will be in St Mary’s on Saturday 8th November (three weeks earlier than last season’s) and will be with organ accompaniment. The works to be performed are two Te Deums, one by Haydn and the other by John Sanders (1933-2003) who was organist and director of music at Gloucester Cathedral from 1997 to 1994. The two main works are Schubert’s Mass in G major lasting about 25 minutes, with soprano, tenor and bass soloists. The other longer work is the St Nicholas Mass by Haydn Hob XXII:6 As well as these works we have something rather special: Das neugeborne Kindelein by the Danish-born Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707). It is all chorus and we should be singing it in German (which we are so good at!). Buxtehude was much admired by the young Johann Sebastian Bach who travelled 260 miles to Lübeck to hear the seventy-year-old Buxtehude playing the organ and to listen to his compositions. The soloists are Gemma King soprano, Helen Stanley mezzo and bass and tenor lay-clerks to be found by Russell. We are reinstating the Carol Concert to be held in Ross Baptist Church again, on Saturday 6th December at 3pm, followed by tea. The committee have decided not to make this a fund-raiser for a local charity, because to make a worthwhile donation would mean a straight loss on the concert. Being so early in December, we may well be first in the town and being in the first week of Advent, we can perhaps include some Advent carols. Our Spring concert will be on Saturday 14th March in St Mary’s, where we shall be joined by our friends the Musical and Amicable Society and soloists Jennifer Walker, Helen Stanley, Paul Badley and William Burn. Mezzo Helen is the only one who hasn’t sung with us before, (although we shall have heard her in the St Nicholas Mass in November) but some of us heard her sing Dorabella in Pop-up Opera’s Cosi fan Tutte, and she will be excellent. The concert will consist of two substantial works, both masses: Theresienmesse by Franz Joseph Haydn Hob XXII: 12 followed after the interval by Mozart’s Requiem. The Requiem was Mozart’s last work before he died in poverty in 1792 at the age of 36, leaving it incomplete, but one of his pupils, Franz Süssmayer (1766-1803) completed The Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei from sketches left by Mozart. Since then, others, including Duncan Druce (1992, New Novello edition) have brought new scholarship to bear. Following the success of A Night at the Opera at The Larruperz Centre, the committee decided that it would be worth repeating with a similar but not identical programme of well-known arias and choruses. There is a huge daily foot-fall at The Larruperz, of people of all ages and a wide range of tastes, and it must be the way to show off our Choral Society to people who would hesitate to attend an event in church, or who think the music we perform is elitist or uncool and not for them. Let us show them that great music is accessible and there for all to enjoy.

Newsletter – Sotto Voce 2013

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SOTTO VOCE – The Ross-on-Wye Choral Society Newsletter

Editorial

Here we are, having basked in a barbecue summer, resting our voices and looking forward to an exciting new season in Ross. We meet again at 7.30pm at Brampton Abbotts Primary School for our Annual General Meeting on Thursday 5th September. There, the meeting takes the first half of the evening and we shall hear from Clare how we have fared financially in the past year. We saw preliminary figures at our last committee meeting in May and we finished up with a healthy surplus of about £6,500, thanks to some prudent cost savings, the generosity of the Gibson Trust, the Tony Dobbin bequest and a successful and enjoyable fund-raising evening at the Red Lion. But before we get too carried away by the prospect of reduced subscriptions or inviting Placido Domingo to come and sing for us, we have to be mindful of the need to buy the staging we used to hire from the Y Zone (see below). As usual, we shall have wine and nibbles after the AGM, then in the second half we shall have a sing-through of one of the cantatas we shall be performing in November.

This newsletter is a new idea which I hope will keep us all informed and encourage everyone to participate in the affairs of the Society, by writing in with their comments, complaints and even (who knows?) perhaps some helpful suggestions.

Next Season

Russell and John will be continuing as our musical director and pianist. Our first concert will be in St Mary’s at 7.30pm on Saturday 23rd November. The works to be performed are Cantata 140 by Johann Sebastian Bach which we shall be singing in English as Sleepers wake! There is a long opening chorus plus two chorales and two soprano/bass duets. The cantata lasts about 25 minutes. This is followed by Magnificat by Antonio Vivaldi RV 611 which is a bit shorter, and consists of five short choruses totalling about nine minutes with solo parts for soprano, contralto and tenor.

After the interval we shall be doing the first two cantatas from J S Bach’s Christmas Oratorio BWV248, again in English. It should be emphasised that we are singing in English not because we are bad at German. (on the contrary, Mervyn James’s guest Marga who is German, said of our Brahms Requiem that she could have been in Germany). The deciding factor was that the library could only supply us with the English edition and there is no doubt that we shall save valuable rehearsal time by singing in our native tongue. The concert will be with organ accompaniment, but this will be embellished by solo violin obbligato in the first cantata. The organist Michael Haynes is coming all the way from Durham to play some very demanding scores. The other soloists are Peter Harris tenor and the golden-voiced contralto Catherine King who lives at Llangrove and last sang for us in the Messiah we did in 1998 together with our patron Dame Felicity Lott. Catherine’s return is long overdue, but she is a busy international performer.

That concert is earlier than usual, because of potential clashes with other choral societies at a busy time of the year, followed by numerous carol concerts and services in the run-up to Christmas, so we shall start straight in on Thursday 27th November (unless we all decide we need to have one week off) rehearsing  for our Spring concert when we shall be performing The Creation by Franz Joseph Haydn. This wonderful work is in three parts with ten choruses and solo soprano, tenor and bass. Jimmy Holliday, who sang bass solo in our Messiah last December returns, as does tenor Peter Wilman. Soprano Lucy Bowen joins us for the first time from Hereford where she is married to Geraint, the cathedral’s director of music, and is a frequent performer in cathedral concerts. It will be good to make the connection with Hereford, and perhaps attract some audience from there. Again, we shall be singing in English, which is perhaps less contentious as many of the words are from Milton and Haydn supervised publication of the first edition which included an English text. We have invited a choir to join us from Betzdorf, our twin town in Germany. We don’t yet know if they are going to come and they may draw the line at singing in English. The performance will be in St Mary’s on Saturday 8th March, with the Musical and Amicable Society orchestra playing modern instruments, although they will be bringing a fortepiano, as called for in the score.

Our final concert of the 2013/14 season  will be on Saturday 10th May in the Larruperz Centre. This will be A Night at the Opera,  with choruses from the Oxford Book of Opera Choruses edited by John Rutter, which we last sang from in 2007. There will be soprano and tenor soloists, yet to be appointed. To sing in the Larruperz is not a new departure, for we performed there many times in earlier days. The reason we are going there is to show off Ross Choral Society to an audience who may be uncomfortable in church and there is a huge daily footfall from town and the surrounding countryside which will be exposed to publicity for the concert. John will accompany on the piano. This is a change from the earlier plan to do The Beggar’s Opera, but by extraordinary coincidence, Brian Jackson and the Phoenix Singers are putting it on at the Phoenix Theatre in November.

Staging

When Herefordshire Council decided to close down the Y Zone in Hill Street and sell the premises, it created a potential problem for us, as whoever bought it might dispose of the staging to a buyer who might remove it from Ross and pay a price which we could not afford to better, In the past, we have hired the 1m x 2m decks which are an essential element in our bespoke staging for St Mary’s, so we could not afford to lose access to it. In the event, Ross Baptist Church was the buyer so Dennis got straight on to them to ensure that we could have first refusal on the staging if they wanted to dispose of it. Once they had decided they did, the Committee agreed that Dennis should have a budget figure within which to negotiate and thanks to Dennis’s formidable negotiating skills, we have acquired staging which cost something in the order of £11,000 and which has only ever been used by us, for £1,200 – comfortably within our budget.

Unfortunately, there is still a problem. Because the  desks of the two front pews at St Mary’s are now so fragile, they cannot be removed without risk of collapse, which means there will be too little space for orchestra and soloists when we do The Creation. We therefore have to purchase two or three rows – 6 or 9 deck units half a metre wide instead of the full metre, to give us an extra 1 or 1.5 metres of space in front of the chorus. We shall be talking to the supplier at the end of this month to see what he can offer, and Dennis’s negotiating skills will be once more brought to bear.

Situations Vacant

With the retirement of Robin Catcheside  (which we hope is  temporary), together with that of helpers David and John, Dennis is concerned that the erection and dismantling of the staging will become a real problem which can only be solved if he can have regular committed help, rather than the present system of willing volunteers. In other words, he would like an assistant who will commit to all the concert days and learn all the ins and outs of managing a concert in St Mary’s, including the staging, so that in due course he can take over from Dennis, who has done the job so well for the past 15 years.

Clare is finding it hard to do all that being Treasurer means. She is happy to keep the books and produce the accounts, but working as she does in an office some way from the town centre, she finds it hard to get to the bank, to draw cash and pay in takings. If you can help, please have a word with Clare to see what can be done to ease her workload.

Chris Renfield has volunteered to be librarian for which we must all be truly grateful. But she will be in at the deep end when we come back in September, with three scores to issue. We need two or three people to volunteer to book copies out at the first rehearsal, so could we please hear from you if you are willing to help?

Finally, we are short of committee members, so could we please have some volunteers? We usually meet about five times a year.