There were two ladies and a man. The two ladies ran the audition. The man just helped us relax... he pushed my shoulders down 'cus they were too tight. I saw him the week before conducting [at the SSO Beethoven's 9th concert]. I recognize him from his hair.
Diego Encarnacion, 9
The Children's Philharmonic Choir had auditions today at the YMCA. If you're interested in having your kid try out, there's more info here.
Labels: music
For all my friends who still don't know what a podcasts are and/or how to get them.
1 - Get the iPodder software here: http://www.ipodder.org/directory/4/ipodderSoftware You don't actually need the software to listen to podcasts - they are simply MP3 files. This just faciliates subscribing to podcast feeds and syncing with your MP3 player.
2 - Get the content here: http://www.podcastalley.com/ Personally I'm enjoying the Bitterest Pill. My Mac head friends are into the MacCast. Daily Source Code is also a fairly good one to start with.
OK now you're on your own.
Labels: tech
Once upon a time all you had were Soros, Merriweather, the Charlie Chans of this world and some Nobel Laureates. Now there's a trillion dollars in hedge funds each trying to make 20%. The whole banking system doesn't even make $200bn a year so it's impossible. It's not going to happen.
Charlie Chan, 13 May 2005
Labels: finance
Ode Post Mortem
SSC 25th ANNIVERSARY
BEETHOVEN'S CHORAL SYMPHONY
DATE
May 6, 2005
FEATURING
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Lim Yau conductor
Lim Yan piano
Tamara Matthews soprano
Graciela Araya mezzo-soprano
Paul Austin Kelly tenor
Johannes Mannov bass
Singapore Symphony Chorus
The Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Singapore
Singapore Bible College Chorale
Hallelujah Chorus
PROGRAMME
BEETHOVEN- Choral Fantasy (19')
BEETHOVEN- Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (65')
The first half of the concert was Beethoven's Fantasy for Piano and Chorus. This is a simple piece which anyone can enjoy on first hearing. Lim Yan, Lim Yau's nephew, was the pianist. He is a fairly young guy (presently doing his national service I'm told) but in rehearsals he came across as confident and easy going.
The Fantasy went well. In rehearsals everyone had a lot of fun playing this piece. The theme is initially set by the piano then carried around the orchestra. I found the performance of the woodwinds particularly charming. I was sitting right behind the clarinets, and when they doubled up with the bassoons, they really found a groove that lifted the whole ensemble. It was great and the audience went into the intermission looking happy.
In the intermission, Nella Hunkin, the principal cellist said in all sincerity, "The sopranos sounded great this time: they're weren't flat! I guess they were saving it for the performance!"
In the second half we performed Beethoven's 9th. I say half but the piece is 65 minutes compared to the mere 20 minutes of Fantasy. The 9th is actually a tough one to do for this kind of audience. Most people show up because (a) they know somebody in the choir and/or (b) they know a few bars of Ode to Joy - the 4th movement of the Symphony.
There's a solid 50 minutes of music before you get to Ode. The second movement of the 9th is also fairly recognizable but really all these people want to hear is the last movement. People bring their kids 'cus they figure it will be an easy one to wean them onto classical music with... NOT. If they're lucky, the kids will sleep through the first three movements and not get restless.
In addition to the chorus, Ode includes 4 soloists. The first to sing is the bass. Johannes Mannov was absolutely brilliant - he has fantastic projection and tone. He was very quickly joined by the male voices of the choir who echo his shouts of "Freude" - Joy. He then sings the familiar tune and is joined by the entire choir for the "refrain." The four soloists then take over and there is a bit of this soloists - choir - soloists for the rest of the piece. OK these are seriously abridged programme notes. But you get the idea.
It struck me that on several occasions, when the soloists were singing, they seemed to be slightly out of phase with the orchestra. The choir might have suffered the same problem but when you're singing at the back of the stage, it's not that easy to hear what the rest of the orchestra is doing.
The other soloists were not as brilliant as Mannov on the evening. This is a shame because in rehearsal, the soprano, Tamara Matthews, was fantastic. On her first night of rehearsal even Lim Yau was charmed enough to give her a big hug and I have NEVER seen him do that before in rehearsal ! The second night, however, her voice seemed to be going. Performance night I was told she was a bit weak and it sounded like she dropped her penultimate note in the run-up to the choir's finale.
By this point the choir had already had one major flub which I was later told nobody in the audience picked up on. For those in the know, the second time we have to sing "Alle Menchen", everyone was hesitant and the volume was seriously impaired. It was bizarre because the whole choir held back and we'd never made this mistake in rehearsal. I can only assume Lim Yau did something we didn't expect or perhaps didn't give us a cue he usually gives because the reaction of the choir was too uniform and instantaneous to explain it on random behavior within the choir.
Of course we're supposed to be able to come in without being totally reliant on him - but we're not a professional choir. I think we constantly surprise him on how dependant we are for his guidance. This comes down to lack of confidence on our part.
I've pointed out all the weaknesses of the performance but generally it went well. The audience didn't exactly go wild but I think that was less in reaction to our performance as to the fact they were tired after sitting through 70 minutes of classical music when really they just wanted 20 minutes of Ode to Joy.
Personally, I cannot express what a huge privilege it is to sing this piece with such a brilliant conductor and fantastic orchestra. To me this isn't simply about making music, it's about reaching for something higher.
Technorati Tags: music, sso, limyau, beethoven, choir
Labels: music
This Friday, May 6th, we (the choir) perform Beethoven's 9th as well as his Choral Fantasy. Last night was the first rehearsal held at the Esplanade (usually the SSC rehearses at the Victoria Concert Hall).
As usual, I arrived early in the hopes of catching the orchestra rehearsing. There is nothing more aurally exhilarating than listening to the SSO when you have the Esplanade to yourself. I've done it several times but it still makes my heart race.
I was the first to arrive and thus the first of the choir to discover that our security passes had been lost. The passes are pre-printed 8x5cm multicolor cards which you wear while backstage. A member of SSO admin was talking to the guard without much luck: the passes were gone and it was a public holiday so nobody was around to effect a proper search. I sat down to wait it out. A few other choir members drifted in and joined me.
Then Lim Yau arrived. I mentioned that the passes were lost, which I think he was aware of, but in typical fashion he didn't reply and walked straight through security with his SSO credentials. But something must have registered as a minute later he was back asking the guards to sort it out. LY was really the only one who could force some action: the situation needed a bit of fear factor to get the guards thinking creatively.
Eventually, he got them to agree to let us in based on the ID confirmation by an SSO staff member who would check our names off a list. We then got a sticker to identify ourselves (we looked like a tour group) and were allowed through.
When I got through to the concert hall, I discovered the orchestra wasn't rehearsing that evening. Instead, a group of "roadies" were tweaking the hall under the instructions of LY. The Esplanade has a lot of moving parts: a moveable ceiling, large doors near the roof, risers for the choir. There's a hell of a lot of hydraulics behind the pretty wood and watching it in action is quite cool.
Once that was settled, there was a fuss about the chairs. The first row of chairs had rubber feet. But the next three rows were wooden. Any time you sat down or stood up, there was a fairly loud grinding noise against the floor. It's probably something an audience wouldn't think about twice though it would sound horrible on a recording. Clearly it would be a distraction to the piece in progress - that is if you weren't already distracted by the fact 150 people just stood up.
LY was rather cranky about this as they (i.e. the Esplanade management) had supposedly promised to sort this out. And it seemed rather easy to sort too: give every member of the choir four felt pads to stick on the bottom of the chairs and within 15 minutes the volume of the chairs would drop appreciably. Anyway no such creativity was at hand.
I should point at that even though the upcoming performance is billed as "The SSC 25th Anniversary Concert", the chorus is actually an amalgamation of four choirs: the Singapore Symphony Chorus (SSC), The Philharmonic Chamber Chorus (TPCC), The Hallelujah Chorus and the Singapore Bible College. This is because the SSC at only 90 strong is too small to be a symphonic chorus. Ideally you need 180. There actually used to be as many as 140 people in the SSC but due to what Lim Yau candidly described one day as his "charming personality" numbers had dropped since he took over as conductor. The fact is, he set the bar higher and not everyone could make the grade or was inclined to. The standard has supposedly improved (I don't really know as I wasn't around then) but on the con side reinforcements are now required. Having dedicated Christians supplement your numbers also limits the possible repertoire but this is another story.
The TPCC is actually LY's own choir and it's understood that you have to be pretty good to get in there. In truth they are fantastic: I've been to several of their concerts and they've never failed to completely mesmerize me.
Our rehearsal started with the semi-chorus opening of The Choral Fantasy. The "semi-chorus" is a hand-picked subset of the larger chorus chosen to sing the solo parts as a group. Each participating choir nominated 2 people for each voice part. This meant that LY didn't hand pick the entire semi-chorus - half were chosen by the choral masters of the respective choirs.
The result was that in the choral opening for Fantasy, the sopranos were extremely weak. Even the dedicated semi-chorus rehearsal had not corrected this - their voices were lost in the great hall. No problem - some quick adjustments were made. LY started moving people around. He asked various women to sit to one end of the second row and join the semi-chorus. When the dust settled it was apparent that he'd deftly pulled together a cast of seven TPCC sopranos to carry the effort.
It worked - the section now sounded great. Plus there was a group of TPCC sopranos looking like a pack of cats who'd eaten canaries. They were definitely pleased to be in the semi-chorus. Meanwhile various members of the SSC were steaming. It seems that some of the altos were none too impressed that despite that this was the SSC anniversary concert, only 2 of their section made it into the alto semi-chorus of about 18.
I have no illusions about my diva status so I was just glad he sorted out the opening. The fact that less than an eigth of the semi-chorus is made up of SSC members is a footnote that concerns me not.
OK so the way rehearsal usually goes is this: We start at 7:30pm or a few minutes later in which case there's a mandatory lecture about arriving late which all the latecomers miss; then we run through a passage; the choral master (Lim Yau) has us work on a few problems; he works with individual sections on weak areas in such a way that each section (i.e. soprano, alto, tenor bass) gets a bit of a vocal break; occasionally he waxes lyrical about some topic and thus amuses us while we get a breather; after an hour and a half of this we get a 15-20 minute break; then we carry on for another hour and end by about 10:15pm.
This lets us get in about 2 1/2 hours of rehearsal with enough breaks thrown in that your voice isn't pushed too hard.
However last nights rehearsal went like this:
A number of people arrived early. LY wanted to get going so he started warming us up and thereby got an early start on being irritated that we weren't really ready. Finally the whole choir was in place 5 minutes early (this is a record) and we started with the Choral Fantasy. There was very little breaking into sections (semi-chorus reconfiguration aside) as at this point it wasn't so much that individual sections needed boning up but that we needed to come together as a choir. We needed to feel out our color, tempo and space in this new hall as the acoustics of the Esplanade are a bit tricky to get used to. It can be quite difficult to hear what's going on at the front of the stage when you're at the back and at times even hearing your cues from the other vocal parts is difficult. So we worked on this. It was full on.
Come break time, LY wasn't inclined to stop. The fact is that when you have 150 people head off in different directions for 15 minutes, the break can drag out. He proposed to the choir that we would press on but that he'd agree to let everyone go early. I can tell you that nobody in that room was under any illusion they were getting out of there a minute before usual. Anyway with rehearsal time so precious at this stage, who could argue?
Fantasy is not that demanding. Ode, however, is a serious piece of music requiring full use of your pipes. By 9:30pm my vocal chords were genuinely tired. I could hear a lot of voices around me start to fade. There's one section where we sopranos have to hold a high A for 8 bars. Most people have to take a breath in between but I find this no problem. I noticed, however, that as voices paused for breath, many weren't coming back in for the rest of the passage. At one point I was the only voice in a section of about 5 chairs. I realized that if I didn't adopt a similar strategy I would be putting my voice at risk for the efforts required later in the week. So I started to join them. LY wasn't totally oblivious to what was happening as at one point he asked us that if we were going to fake it at least try use the appropriate mouth position and not be so obvious.
So what time did we finish? 10:12pm. Technically we did finish early although it certainly wasn't quid pro quo!
Lim Yau's parting comment to the choir was that we should keep our Esplanade sticker as a memento of "Administrative Incompetence."
2 more rehearsals to go before Friday...
Tags: singapore, choir, beethoven, music, limyauLabels: music
