Music for Royal Occasions
The next Fairfax Choral Society concert is “Music for Royal Occasions” with the Washington Symphonic Brass. (Logistics details here.) Unfortunately, I’ll have to sit this concert out; I agreed to the ETD 2006 conference not realizing that it conflicts with mandatory dress rehearsal (which turns out to be the day before the concert rather than the day of). My own stupid fault; I’ll take my lumps for it. I can still sit in on rehearsals, and I have been.
If you’re expecting pompous bombast from this one, given its title… well, yes, we’ve got that. Fortunately, that’s not all we’ve got. I’m quite looking forward to the concert openers by the Washington Brass, because there will always be a soft spot in my wizened ex-medievalist soul for Hildegard von Bingen.
Gabrieli’s In Ecclesiis is pleasant and gentle enough; we have some work to do to tune it, but we’ll get there. The Purcell pieces, written for Queen Mary’s funeral and shortly thereafter used for Purcell’s own, highlight Purcell’s talent for setting English text, English being a peculiarly horrible language to set music to.
Handel’s “Zadok the Priest” is… look, composers have their own styles, I get that. Handel, though, often feels to me as though he’s outright cribbing from himself. “Huh,” said my next-door neighbor at last rehearsal. “Doesn’t that feel like the Royal Fireworks music?” She hummed along with the piano, and sure enough… whereas I had already noted plenty of Messiah cribs. It’s bog-standard Handel. If you like Handel, you’ll like it. If you don’t, you can at least come up with a drinking game for the too-familiar-sounding bits.
(Could be worse. Purcell was good at setting English text. Handel wasn’t—no surprise, as English wasn’t his native language. This piece doesn’t have any embarrassing “All we like sheep” moments, at least.)
My only complaint about Ralph Vaughan Williams’ graceful “O Taste and See” is that it’s too short. As that is my standard complaint about Vaughan Williams, it can safely be ignored. Listen for this one, as it should be a program highlight if we find a good soloist.
The program’s incipient trainwreck is William Walton’s “Coronation Te Deum.” It’s a tough piece. I admit I don’t like it very much, not for its complexity and difficulty, but because a lot of the hard bits feel pointless—call-and-response that doesn’t work very well, silly rhythm tricks that don’t add anything to the text, bombastic fanfare accompaniment that feels like it has a different agenda altogether from the chorus’s.
I’ll gladly work hard for a piece that feels like good music. This doesn’t. This feels like Walton was trying far too hard to be Cool and Rad and Modern. Not that I won’t work hard anyway. It’s just a harder sell; I have to make myself sit down with my rehearsal CD. I’m tempted to check the music press of the time (it was written for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953) to see if anyone reviewed this piece, and what they thought of it.
The real winner in this program is Tavener’s “Song for Athene,” which was sung for Princess Diana’s funeral. This is a wondrously spooky-ethereal piece that will make you shiver and sidle closer to the person next to you. It expresses deep pain without sensationalizing it, and offers hope without trivializing grief. I am deeply impressed with it, and I think (based on what we did with the Chilcott) that we have the chops to pull it off.
I do wonder a little about its placement in the program; it leads directly into the concert finale, the too-pompous-for-words Parry “I Was Glad.” I might have switched it with the Vaughan Williams, as a welcome antidote to Handel—but it’s not my program, and I’m no conductor anyway.
It’ll be a good show, if we can pull the Walton together.