Santa's jingling his bells!

Okay, this is definitely the last post before 2012.

I'm sure you're well aware it's no accident that Santa is an anagram of Satan, and if you play the original recording of 'Jingle Bells' backwards you hear the message "buy lots of unnecessary gifts for your friends and family this Christmas", but how can you break away from the over commercialised travesty that Christmas has become without becoming a po-faced prig or party bore? It's simple, just follow these two steps in the phantomchoralsnake guide to having an enjoyable and meaningful Christmas.
(1) Take part in this extremely short music quiz to get your brain active again after all of that boozing / eating / snoozing / TV watching (please delete as appropriate). There's only one question with a single word as the answer, no prizes and no answer until my next New Year post. Ready?
(Q) Sir Edward _______ was an English composer who wrote a Welsh Rhapsody in 1904, which has been recorded by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra amongst others. What is the missing surname? If you really need another clue think about the theme plus a well established post lunch Christmas Day tradition which might help you out a bit.

(2) Talking of Christmas lunch, why not help some of the less well off members of the local community to eat well over Christmas, and all year round? Visit the Oxford Food Bank website and give them a donation towards distributing excess food from supermarkets and other food suppliers to over 30 charities who help feed the needy. Believe it or not, for every £1 you donate they deliver £25 worth of produce around the Oxford area! Amazing to think that a donation of just £14.60 now would result in £1 of food being distributed every single day in 2012!!! It's all run by volunteers (feel free to offer your help) and that food would otherwise just be dumped as waste. The criminal thing is that despite all of their efforts there is 10 times that amount or more still being dumped unnecessarily. All it needs is more donations and volunteers to change Oxford to a zero food waste area - now wouldn't that be a Christmas present well worth giving? So what are you waiting for?????

Enough of the preachy, touchy - feely, emotional stuff. I'm off for Christmas, and I know I'm going to enjoy my presents, grub and even the odd bit of booze. Just remember that useful biblical phrase though if it all starts getting a bit out of hand - "get thee behind me Santa!"

Christmas special recordings review (Oct to Dec 2011)

Okay I know it isn't really Christmas yet, not even December, but I've received my first Christmas card, the December issue of Gramophone Magazine is in my grubby little mitts and I probably won't get around to another post before the new year, so 'Christmas Special' it is!

What really makes it special is that intead of three recommendations you're getting a massive six recordings thrust under your nose as featured in the last three months of Gramophone Magazine plus the extra Awards issue.

Awards issue - a bit of a cheat as it was actually launched several months earlier, but it's definitely worth cheating a bit to include the winner of the Early Music Award, which was Alessandro Striggio's Mass in 40 parts by I Fagiolini on Decca. The linked page on Youtube has several interesting videos connected to this recording. An absolutely amazing work and performance - I'd be desperately trying to find an opportunity to sing it myself if I didn't realise how difficult it must be to make it sound that marvellous.
October issue - 'Beyond all mortal dreams' by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge on Hyperion. Wonderful performances of post 2nd World War acapella works by not so well known American composers. Very atmospheric, but not one to get the pulses racing - one to chill out to (as they seem to be permanently telling us on Classic FM). The linked Youtube video features one of the tracks performed by a slightly less accomplished, but still competent choir which gives you an idea of the overall feel of this recording.
November issue - MacMillan Miserere, O bone Jesu etc by The Sixteen on Coro. One of my favourite choirs performing works by one of my favourite contemporary Scottish composers. The linked Youube video includes O bone Jesu six minutes into a James MacMillan TV documentary.
PLUS.... 'Song wants to be light' Cuban choral music by the National Chorus of Cuba on Dabringhaus & Grimm. To be absolutely honest I haven't managed to hear any of this recording yet, but I'm going to keep trying to track it down - a good review and it has to sound different from the average vocal recording in your collection.
December issue - 'In the beginning' by the Choir of Merton College, Oxford on Delphian. A mixture of 16th century through to contemporary works around the theme of Genesis (biblical, not pop), all beautifully sung.
PLUS.... it has to be a festive recording to finish off the year, so why not try something a little bit different? Pick up a copy of 'Gregorianische Gesange' by the Choral School of the Benedictine Abbey of Munsterscwarzach for only £4.59 on Amazon and there's not a carol in sight, just 46 tracks of Gregorian Chant to help drown out the Queen's speech on TV. Who could ask for more?

Ten slightly obscure, but wonderful, choral recordings.

There's a good chance that most of these will be new discoveries for the majority of readers. Even if you've been singing in choirs or going to concerts for years my bet is that none of you will have more than two of these recordings in your collection or sung / heard them live. They cover everything from baroque through to contemporary composers so everyone should be able to find something to like.

Here they come in alphabetical order:

(1) Corrette Laudate Dominum & Denoye Mass / Le Parlement de Musique etc. / Ambronay.
(2) Finzi Intimations of Immortality / Bournemouth Symphony Chorus & Orchestra / Naxos.
(3) Hindemith When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd / Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus / Telarc.
(4) Part Choral works (incl. 7 Magnificat Antiphons) / Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir / Virgin Classics.
(5) Penderecki Polish Requiem / Warsaw National Philharmonic Choir & Orchestra / Naxos.
(6) Saint Saens Requiem / Coro della Radio Svizzera / Chandos.
(7) Szymanowski Stabat Mater / CBSO Chorus / EMI.
(8) Tormis Estonian Calendar Songs / Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir / Virgin Classics.
(9) Whitacre Light & Gold / Eric Whitacre Singers etc. / Decca.
(10) Zelenka Missa Votiva / Collegium 1704 / Zig-Zag Territoires.

Click on the works to hear excerpts. Most are Youtube videos of the listed artists performing part of the works (although some of these are live performances rather than the studio recording), but the Finzi and Tormis are different performers, and the latter is just short snatches of ten songs on Amazon as no video seems to exist in that case.

Enjoy, as our American cousins would say.

Most popular choral works in Classic FM Hall of Fame



I'm sure that many of you will be avid followers of Classic FM and may well have participated in their 'Hall of Fame' over the years. The following is a list of all the choral works appearing in the top 100 of their 'Ultimate Hall of Fame' which totals up votes from 1976 to this year.

Fifteen choral works made the cut, including three by Mozart and two each by Handel, Bach and Faure, but none of these came out on top. Here they are in ascending order:

91 Elgar Dream of Gerontius
88 Bach Mass in B Minor
78 Bach St. Matthew Passion
72 Mozart Solemn Vespers
71 Mozart Ave verum corpus
59 Handel Zadok the Priest
55 Verdi Requiem
52 Orff Carmina Burana
42 Faure Cantique de Jean Racine
25 Faure Requiem
23 Allegri Miserere
19 Mozart Requiem
18 Handel Messiah

.... and the most popuar choral work over the last 15 years was ....

9 Beethoven Ode to Joy from the Choral Symphony

Interesting. Lots of lovely music and mostly the expected culprits rising to the top, but a bit of a surprise (to me at least) having Ode to Joy pipping Messiah and the three heavyweight Requiems to the top spot. Mind you I bet that Messiah gets performed in concert ten times as often as Beethoven's Choral Symphony. If you live in Oxford you'll definitely have several chances to hear Messiah live between now and the end of the year including at the 90th Anniversary concert of Oxford Harmonic Society on 26th November in Oxford Town Hall.

If you want to see the whole of the Classic FM 'Ultimate Hall of Fame' click here on Top 300.

Looking for a choir to join?

Maybe you've just moved into the Oxford area, or perhaps you sang in your youth, stopped, and now you're thinking about singing again.  The big question is how do you find your dream choir? The first step is probably to clearly identify what you're looking for before you start trying to identify potential choirs to join.

• What sort of repertoire do you want to sing - 'mainstream' large choral works, smaller scale chamber works, contemporary music, gospel or church music, a capella, barbershop or other 'niche' music?
• What size of choir would you be comfortable singing in, and would you prefer a mixed voice choir or a single gender choir? 
• Do you want to be involved in serious concert performances or are you just after a chance to sing along with a few mates for your own pleasure (i.e. a social organisation as much as a musical one)?
• What is your level of musical ability (probably somewhere between 'can hold a tune, but can't read music' to 'excellent sight reader and trained musician')?
• What level of musicianship would you expect from your fellow choir members and other performers involved in concerts?
• Is the location for rehearsals and concerts important or are you able to travel across a wide area?
• What level of commitment are you willing to put in in terms of time, effort and money?

That's probably enough to be thinking about at this stage. So when you've got all of your answers to the above questions sorted out in your head what comes next?

Well the good news is that there are dozens of choirs in the Oxford area and lots of information about them easily available on the internet and elsewhere. The bad news is that it can be difficult trying to narrow it down to the right choir for you personally.

Let's start with a few examples where your requirements would automatically narrow down the choice considerably :

• If you're connected to a particular educational establishment such as Oxford University or Brookes University and want to stick to an in house choir you can easily find a number of options from their Music Department. If they don't suit you then you can widen your search to look outside.
• Likewise choirs connected to specific churches can easily be identified by contacting them direct.
• Specialist choirs are also usually relatively easy to track down by a simple Google search leading to a limited number of options (for example searching for 'Oxford Welsh Male Voice Choir' or 'Oxford Gospel Choir' will lead directly to choirs with exactly those names).
• If a specific location is the prime concern then a Google search for the 'place name' & 'choir' should tell you what's available. Further information might also be available fom Parish websites and magazines. These may be the only methods of tracking down small local choirs with a high social content to their activities who put on less formal concerts, or community choirs who only perform locally.

If the above examples don't cover what you're looking for it probably means that you're after a more 'serious' choir performing mainstream classical choral works in central Oxford venues. These organisations can usually be classified either as a smaller chamber choir (50 or less singers, often performing a capella or with a small number of musicians, and requiring a high level of musicianship) or a large scale choral society (often 100 or more singers performing large scale choral works with orchestral accompaniment). These two types of choirs often have their own websites, but can most easily be tracked down through other websites that include 'choir finder' facilities such as 'Gerontius' or 'Making Music'. There is a strong crossover between the choirs listed on both these websites but they list them in different ways. Gerontius allows selection by type of choir and size as well as location whereas Making Music lists choirs solely in terms of their proximity to a location.

So now you've got a list of 'serious mainstream mixed voice choirs' sitting in front of you, which ones are worth a look at in more detail by going onto the choir's own websites? If it's a chamber choir you're after I would point you towards choirs like Commotio or Jubilate for a mixture of everything from early to contemporary music. As for the larger choirs it has to be the two longest established organisations, namely the Oxford Bach Choir and Oxford Harmonic Society. Both perform a wide range of large scale works, from the well known (Handel's Messiah, Verdi's Requiem and the like) to pieces by lesser known composers such as Caldara or Loewe, and both use professional soloists and orchestras. The Bach Choir has a longer and possibly slightly more prestigious history, but Oxford Harmonic Society isn't far behind, with a reasonably impressive 90 years of music making behind them. The other main difference between these two choirs? Well, subscriptions for Oxford Harmonic Society are currently £99 p.a., but the Bach Choir cost a hefty £180!

That's it. Now it's up to you to do the searching, find the choir of your dreams, and, most importantly, start singing.

The highs and lows of singing

Taking middle C (C4) as a starting point the average bass singer will cover roughly a couple of octaves below, and a soprano two octaves above that point using their normal (modal) voice. So how many other types of singing voice are there, and how high or low can the human voice actually go? There are links from several of the named indiviuals below to examples of them singing, so have a listen and prepare to be amazed.

Well, apparently there are four vocal registers, although they are of variable use in practice. After the normal or 'modal' register next up is 'falsetto' as used by most male altos / countertenors and other men wanting to discretely sing along with women's parts in rehearsals. Then there are 'whistle notes' normally used by female singers for extreme high notes (E6 and upwards). Finally, the lowest vocal register is known as 'vocal fry', 'glottal rattle' or any number of other terms implying that it is basically a non-musical growl of very little use in 'serious' singing.

So what are the extremes achieved by less than average singers? Let's start with the top end of male voices. Some of you might know about Michael Maniaci 'the male soprano'. He's got a beautiful voice covering the standard soprano range because his voice simply didn't break when he went through puberty. Given the lack of castrati these days that makes him pretty unusual. Have a listen to Adam Lopez though. He's naturally a tenor, but can go down into the bass range and way up high using whistle notes to hit a Csharp8 (that's an 8 octave range and a world record high note for men). Being an Australian he's eager to clarify that he is 'all there' but it's still a bit disconcerting to hear a man sing that high.

Over to the ladies then. In classical music the top note required in standard repertoire is a G6 (in an aria by Mozart, a Massenet opera and in Thomas Ades' The Tempest which also asks for 17 E6's in the first scene alone) and F6 appears in a number of pieces, most famously the Queen of the Night arias in The Magic Flute. Beyond that a few works were written specifically for soloists such as Erna Sack and Mado Robin which go up to C7, but these are hardly ever performed these days. To break the ceiling set by Adam Lopez we've got to look to pop singers. Individuals such as Mariah Carey and Minnie Ripperton regularly zip up into whistle notes, but the highest of the high is Brazilan pop singer Georgia Brown. She also has an incredible 8 octave range, with a G8 appearing on one of her records, but as the world record she  managed an astounding G10!

After that we'll drop into the depths. Unfortunately I have no idea of the lowest note achieved by a female, but true women basses do exist, so it's going to be pretty low. For men the obvious place to go for a proper basso profundo is Russia, and you can find a reasonable number of 'Octavists' there who basically sing an octave below normal bass range down to around E1. Vladamir Pasjukov and Aleksander Ort are two examples. Penderecki wrote an F1 in his Song of Cherubim, but for choirs luckily the lowest requirement is 'only' a Bflat1 in Mahler's 2nd Symphony and Rachmninov's Vespers. You can hear a performance of the Mahler on 5th November in Oxford Town Hall being put on by Oxford Symphony Orchestra with Oxford Harmonic Society as the main choir. That means I personally will be attempting to plummet to those depths - wish me luck. Outside of classical music there is certainly some competition from gospel and country singers such as Paul David Kennamer, Tim Storms and Roger Menees amongst others. The latter has managed to use the vocal fry register to growl his way down to 0.393 hertz (we're into negative numbers on standard terminology here) which might possibly be the world record. I wouldn't exactly call it singing though. For a more pleasant exampled of vocal fry try listening to Abert Kuvezin of Yat Kha - a group who combine Albert's growls with a spot of Tuvan throat singing. Ah yes, Tuvan throat singing - how does that fit into the four vocal registers? Maybe you'll have to ask a Tuvan that one.

Choral recordings review - June to September 2011

Yes, I know it's only the first week of August, but the September edition of Gramophone magazine is out already, and my reviews will be based on highlighting interesting new choral recordings from their reviews section, so September it is. This will hopefully become a regular quarterly review, but for the first one you get an extra month bunged in free of charge!

June - Sandstrom Nordic Sounds, Swedish Radio Choir on Channel Classics. A cappella Swedish contemporary choral music. Generally quite melodic and nothing too scary for sensitive souls who normally steer well clear of anything contemporary, but apparently a bit of a nightmare to sing. You can listen to the whole CD on the Spotify website.

July - Jonathan Harvey The Angels, Ashes Dance Back etc., Latvian Radio Choir on Hyperion. More contemporary music, from a British composer this time. Interesting use of electronics and a range of other less common instruments. Slightly less accessible than the Sondstrom, but veering towards ethereally uplifting at times. Unless you're in a top quality choir this is probably another one to just listen to rather than perform. Hear excerpts on the Hyperion website.

August - Gounod Requiem & Messe Chorale, Ensemble Vocale de Lausanne on Mirare. Lashings of lush Romanticism for you to get your teeth into after two portions of slightly austere contemporary music. The Requiem is the main work here and it's the one he wrote in 1893 (apparently he wrote four requiems in total). Sounds like a good work for a large choir to get stuck into, and almost as good as his wonderful St. Cecilia Mass. You can listen to another recording of this work (by Choeur de Chambre Romand) on the Spotify website, but unfortunately there seem to be nothing available online beyond 30 second excerpts on Amazon when it comes to this recording.

 September - Grandi Vespro della Beata Vergine, Bach Collegium Stuttgart on Carus. No, I'd never heard of him either. Allessandro Grandi in case you were wondering, early 17th Century Venetian composer, and for several years Monteverdi's deputy at St. Marks so you know where this work is coming from.  You won't find this 'Vespers' listed as a work elsewhere as it's basically a number of seperate shorter pieces pulled together solely for this CD. You might well argue that Moteverdi's Vespers is the greater work, but Grandi wasn't far off that level, and ths live recording is, to quote Gramophone, "flawless". Sounds like a good sing too so lets hope it catches on. Hear excerpts on the Carus website.

Of course you probably want to rush out and buy a copy of all these recordings now you've heard about them. If you live in Oxford then your best bet is Blackwell's Music Shop in Broad Street, your local classical music experts.

That's it for this review. The next one should be in November including all of those lovely Christmas releases.

Choirs in art over the centuries

Okay, a bit of a sideline, but it's interesting sometimes to stand back and see how the rest of the world sees us singers. Here is a whirlwind tour in 3 short sections of how choirs have been portrayed in paintings over the centuries. Given how popular singing is as a pastime the main surprise is how few paintings there actually are. Opera singers and singers performing solos or duets with attendant pianos or small groups of instruments get a bit of a look in, but poor old choirs - blink and you'll miss them.

Phase 1 - the heavenly choir:
Whizzing back to medieval times everything was so simple. Choirs existed to sing in praise of God, so naturally they might as well be angels. Here from the early 15th century is a lovely example from an alterpiece by Jan van Eyck.

Phase 2 - the rowdy / disobedient / inattentive choir:
Suddenly post-Renaissance choirs became human, with all of the faults you would expect to see magnified a hundred fold in cartoons and paintings covering this topic, right up to the start of the twentieth century. Typical examples from the 19th century include 'A Village Choir' by Thomas Webster (not shown) and the painting below by the lesser known Auguste Joseph Trupheme called simply 'The Choir Lesson'. At least in this one some of the boys are actually singing.

Phase 3 - the blobby semi-abstract choir:
The last hundred years or so have seen 'serious' paintings of choirs disappear even further into the undergrowth. What we seem to be left with now is individual choirs commissioning paintings of themselves, which invariably veer towards colourful semi-abstract (or at least vague and blobby) portrayals. The final example, below, is one such item produced on demand by a local artist to show my own choir, Oxford Harmonic Society, in all its glory, performing amid the neo-Baroque splendours of Oxford Town Hall. And yes, I am in there somewhere (probably back row towards the right) but I can't say it's a good likeness.

The end is nigh, in more ways than one.

Next week - The History of Choirs as portayed in pottery, sculpture and interpretive dance.




Only kidding.

10 Top notch choirs not in Gramophone Magazine's Jan 2011 edition 20 greatest choirs listing

Snappy title isn't it, but basically it does exactly what it says on the tin. This list will sit under my profile for a week or two, but it's repeated here so that you can still see it when that version gets replaced by a new list.

So, in alphabetical order:

Atlanta Symphony Chorus
Bach Collegium Japan
CBSO Chorus
Corydon Singers
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
Gabrieli Consort
London Symphony Chorus
Namur Chamber Choir
New London Chamber Choir
Taverner Choir

I can personally recommend all of these either from recordings or concert performances, or both, and you'll find most of them featuring strongly in any 'recommended recordings' lists for the major choral works. I should point out that I've excluded any Oxford choirs from my list to avoid anyone local sulking or gloating about who was in or out.

Although you probably know all about most of these choirs I will highlight a couple of them:

New London Chamber Choir are amateurs, but you won't believe it when you hear them sing. They do a lot of contemporary stuff and I was lucky enough to hear them perform locally the other year - they totally blew me away! Find out more about them on their website ( NLCC ) and if you ever get the opportunity to go to one of their concerts don't pass it up.

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir probably aren't as well known as they should be either, partly because they tend to record Baltic music (a favourite category of mine, but a minority taste overall) and they don't tour the UK all that often. Having heard them sing at the Cheltenham Music Festival a few years ago, and owning at least half a dozen of  their recordings I would definitely have put them in the '20 greatest choirs' category, and even Gramophone admitted that they were close runners up. Their website ( EPCC ) contains info about recordings and concerts. You'll be hearing a lot more about them in future posts too.

For now have a listen to the videos at the bottom of the page - be warned, however, that some of the works performed by the New London Chamber Choir can be a little bit wild.

Finally for those of you who haven't read the original article, the Gramophone 20 greatest choirs (and I wouldn't really argue with most of them) from 20 to 1 were:
I Fagiolini, The Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Stile Antico, The Balthasar Neumann Choir, Westminster Abbey Choir, Les Arts Florissants, The Choir of New College Oxford, The Tallis Scholars, The Choir of Kings College Cambridge, The Dunedin Consort, Swedish Radio Choir, Rias Chamber Choir, Accentus, Collegium Vocale Ghent, Wells Cathedral Choir, The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, The Sixteen, The Cardinall's Musick, Polyphony and at the top The Monteverdi Choir.

Mind you, two Cambridge choirs above New College Oxford - what were they thinking about?

Ramble on

For those of you who don't recognise the title of this, my very first blog, it's actually the name of an early Led Zeppelin song. Hardly the sort of thing you would expect to see in a blog about Oxford choirs, but then my tastes are fairly widespread so you might have to expect the unexpected. Plus the title probably pretty well sums up my style overall.

By way of introduction I should say that I've lived in Oxford for over half my life (27 years so far, and no sign of moving on) and I've been singing with one Oxford choir, Oxford Harmonic Society for all that time. Apologies if I mention them a lot in various posts, but I will be drawing on personal experience so it shouldn't be too surprising.

What do I have in store for you? Well definitely a review of Oxford choirs to help you identify which ones you might want to join or hear in concert, a bit of information about the various Oxford concert venues, my opinions on various recordings of favourite choral works, the odd list or two (ten obscure but wonderful choral works, the top 10 choral works in Classic FM's Hall of Fame over the years and so on), interesting titbits I've discovered about various composers ......

Yes, I know, I'm rambling on already. Just wait until I really get started.