It’s a little ironic that composers can spend their lives creating great works of art and then they die and begin to decompose.

It used to be that all I knew about Bach was that he composed music for the pipe organ. I thought he was okay but it wasn’t something I was really interested in. That was before I heard Bach choruses sung by boy choirs. Boy, did I change my mind fast. I had no idea how grand and beautiful his music could be.

There is a CD titled Johann Sebastian Bach - Famous Choruses and it features several of the great boy’s choirs: Kings College, Knabenchor Hannover, Tolzer Knabenchor and Wiener Sangerknaben.
It also has the voices of the men’s choir Chorus Viennensis and the mixed adult choir Collegium Vocale (Ghent) but don’t let that stop you from buying the CD. The adults sing in combination with the boy’s choirs and, in my opinion, are improved by doing so.

I just love the first song Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (Heart and Mouth and Deed and Life) which is a very rousing number by the Tolzer Knabenchor.
Another stirring song is Der Himmel Lacht, Die Erde Jubilieret (The Heavens Laugh, The Earth Rejoices) which is sung by both the Tolzer and the King’s College boys. It’s a good pairing.

Every song on here is beautiful and to have such a great collection of boys makes it a perfect album. I like it a lot.

Angelic Voices

If I had studied music instead of art I would have a better musical vocabulary and I could express myself in ways that are more accurately descriptive than to just say that something is ‘beautiful’. That usually doesn’t fully explain the feeling I get from a piece of music.

But there is a line that I walk between using the same adjectives so often that they become boring and using adjectives that sound too pretentious, or at least pretentious for me. I pulled up the old thesaurus the other day and started looking for new superlatives to spice up my writing.

I like words like rich, classy, quiet, fresh, crisp, hearty, and so fourth, but maybe I should try words like scintillating, arresting, resplendent, dazzling or sparkling.

With that in mind I’ll try and describe a CD by that vivacious group of boys, The Vienna Boy’s Choir. This CD is appropriately, if unimaginatively, titled Angelic Voices, the Best of the Vienna Boy’s Choir. What I like best about this CD is the mixture of classical, folk and pop songs. It starts off with that euphonic Bach number 'Jesus Bleibet Meine Freude'. The violins are dynamic and the voices are alluring.
WSK, as always, gives us a very mellifluous version of Mozart’s ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ and they are renown for Handel’s ‘Hallelujah‘.
The soloist on Mendelssohn’s ‘O, For the Wings of a Dove‘, sings the German version and his young, piping voice is ambrosial. It’s the only German version I have heard.
There are well known songs by Handel, Strauss and Mozart, all performed with an effervescent ease. ‘Zadok’ the Priest is especially sonorous.

They follow the classical with songs like ‘Scarborough Fair‘, ‘Shenandoah‘, ‘La Guantanamera’ and ‘Loch Lomand‘, all of which are (get ready) pulchritudinous.

All joking aside, I really do listen to this one a lot. 'Loch Lomond' is one of my favs.

Once Were Angels

I had seen a CD offered on Amazon for a long time and finally got around to ordering it. This turned out to be a good idea because it not only has some great singing but the liner notes have a lot of interesting history about boy choirs.

Back in the 1950’s Harry Mudd built a steel-tape recorder from parts which he had to order. It took three years to get them. With his friend Philip York he began recording boy choir performances. They started with New College but then lots of other choirs wanted to be recorded.
They eventually created the Alpha label and began to make albums. The first was Christmas Carols From New College, Oxford.
Records didn’t sell very well but, and I’ll quote a passage from the text, “The later ‘Alpha Sound’..., which Harry helped create and publicise, is historically tremendously important - it being so different from the cultivated full head tone so popular until the 1950’s. This sound, recorded first of all in Oxford by Harry has today become ‘the’ accepted English chorister tone…”
I don't know exactly what that means but I'll go along with it.

Before WWII boy singers were referred to as boy sopranos by the record companies but Harry Mudd helped change that to Treble Soloist, which is still the more accepted term.
There was a change in English Cathedral music. The ‘English Sound’ was being replaced by the ‘Ely Sound’ which was influenced by the music of Benjamin Britten. The choirs of Oxford and Cambridge were leaders of the new sound.

This CD features recordings that were made before digital recording technology but the music and voices are perfectly clear and beautiful. Here are 24 tracks sung by 13 boys such as Andrew Wicks, Paul Dutton, Michael Ginn, Dara Carroll, Thomas Hunt, Peter Davey and lots more.

They are singing a variety of works like I Will Give My Love An Apple, Mozart’s Alleluya, Pie Jesu, and the Skye Boat song so there is something for everybody. The liner notes tell a bit of history about all of the singers but I won’t go into them here.

I’m very grateful that someone was around to make quality recordings of these boys so that their voices were not lost to us completely.

Here is something fun to do if you have a little imagination. Pick out some appropriate music, put on your earphones and go about your daily routine but pretend that you are in a movie and the music is the soundtrack. Maybe it’s a comedy that day or a drama; let the music set the mood.
They say that the best movie soundtracks are the ones you are not aware of, the music that leads our feelings without taking our attention from the picture.
Perhaps you will be the star of your movie or maybe just an extra or a star making a cameo appearance. Even an ordinary day becomes more fun when you‘re making your own story.
Just don’t break into a song and tap dance in the middle of the mall. Most people won’t understand.


Solvguttene - The Boys of Silver

I got two CD’s from Harry Turne’s Festival web site that I like but they were a bit of a mystery since all of the liner notes are in Norwegian. Solvguttene is from Oslo and I had to go to their web site to find out something about them.
Founded in 1940, they are a big choir, comprised of 65 boys aged 8 to 15, and 25 adult male singers, all of whom have previously been boy singers. Additionally, 25 boys aged 7-9 are training to be qualified for the concert choir.The choir will normally comprise around 60 singers on international tours and has a varied repertoire, although the focus has been and is on classical church choral music.
They have toured a lot and are extremely popular in Norway.

One of the CD’s is Solvguttene Guttekoret, a Celebration Concert in the Boda Kyrka, Sweden. It has good versions of a lot of the standard songs like Panis Angelicus, Pie Jesu, Ave Verum and so forth. Even though most choirs do these same songs it’s the voices that make them different and enjoyable.

The other CD is Solvguttene, 50 Ar (Years). I like it a lot but all of the song listings are in a language that I can’t read. You can find them listed on the BCSD site if you want to know what they are. Maybe your Norwegian is better than mine.

This weekend I drove down to Atlanta to see the Canterbury Cathedral Choir who are touring the states. They were at St. Philip’s cathedral, a huge and beautiful Episcopalian church in an upscale part of town.

The choir has already been to Chicago, Indianapolis and Sewanee, Tennessee and still have Charleston, Richmond, New York, D. C. and Whitemarsh, Pa. ahead of them. It looked like a comfortable bus but that is still a lot of miles to cover.
Before the show I watched for a few minutes as the boys played in the church playground. The were running, climbing and jumping all over the place and were so full of energy they didn’t look as if the tour was wearing on them. Near the end of the show, though, some of them were trying to hide their yawns.

It was a really nice show and I was happy to see how many people turned out for it. The auditorium held, I believe, 2,000 people and it was nearly full. As usual, I got there early for a seat near the front.
There were twelve men and eighteen boys, all dressed in royal purple cassocks, the boys with upright ruffled collars and the men with short ones.
They opened with Vigilate by William Byrd and went on to works by Parsons, Tallis, Scarlatti, Britten and a lot more. Sometimes they were backed up by St. Philip’s big pipe organ and other times it was just their wonderful voices. There was no need for microphones here, they filled the hall with their powerful notes.

What I like about being at a concert like that and sitting close is that it makes easier to follow the different voices as they weave in and out of each other, rising and falling, swelling and softening, complex but always harmonic. It’s fascinating.

All of the music was sacred music except for their last song, their second encore, when they made everyone smile with a sweet, funny version of I Got Rhythm.

While I was there I picked up their newest CD, Ceremony. It features soloist Joel Whitewood, the 2007 Radio 2 Young Chorister of the Year. The boys sing Britten’s Ceremony of Carols and a lot of other nice standards.

Confessions of a Libera junkie

Hello, my name is Larry and I am a Libera addict. I’ve been clean now for almost 20 minutes. I really think I have it under control now… uh… oh no, here I go again…. Ahhhh Gaudate.

I love watching the Libera DVD of their Leiden concert, Angel Voices/Libera in Concert. When I’m bored or if I’m feeling tense or a little down this will always cheer me up.

I liked a term that someone used recently to describe a charismatic choir or chorister; it was chorisma. The chorisma of the Libera boys is magnified by seeing them on stage, especially with close up shots of their faces. Their expressions as they sing are sweet to watch but you can also see details like Tom Cully has freckles and Michael Vereycken has lipstick smeared on his chin. Little Ben Philipp is truly angelic, in fact, they are all just cheek pinching-ly cute.

The lighting is really nice and I like the camera angles and movements. The orchestra is excellent and Fiona lends a very sophisticated touch with her long, black gown contrasting nicely with the boys monk‘s robes.

One of the best parts is the interview footage that is interspersed with scenes of the boys practicing, on tour and playing at school. Tom Cully makes me laugh with the his magic trick and Josh’s smile is contagious.

I won’t say how many times I’ve watched this DVD but it’s a lot.

When a newcomer begins to explore choir music it’s important to remember that just because we don’t recognize the name of a composer or a composition it doesn’t mean that we won’t like it. Instead of keeping to only the more well known figures like Bach and Mozart I think it is more rewarding to branch out.

People who have grown up in the Catholic church were probably introduced to names like Palestrina, Poulenc and Parry at an early age but they were new names to me, and now I like them. Truthfully, I had never heard of Franck, Stanford or Elgar before I started getting into all of this, but now I enjoy their music all the time.

Frequently, if I’m not excited by a song or CD that I’m hearing for the first time, it will grow on me and often become a favorite if I just listen a few more times and let my taste grow and catch up.

Music makes learning fun (I wish I had known that when I was in school) and we can learn about more than music. By being curious about the composers and singers, and looking for information about them, we get exposed to history, geography, literature and more.
Plus, if you drop names like Franck, Stanford and Elgar at a dinner party everyone will think you are really smart.

I learned some new things from a new CD that I got from the Riga Dome Boy’s Choir (sometimes spelled Riga Dom) who are from Riga, Latvia, the home of the Riga Dome cathedral.
This CD is titled Marlindendur, which is the name of a poem by Icelandic poet Jóhann Hjálmarsson. It means a malevolent spirit or witch from Iceland.

The cover says that it “… describes an Icelander experiencing his present through senses suffused with the deep violent past of Iceland - especially the spiritual and social foundations described in the Saga of the People of Eyri.”
That sounds pretty high-brow but the music itself is easy to like.

The singing is amazingly good and so is the music by the Baltic Philharmonic Chamber orchestra. I don’t know when I’ve heard singing and music blend so well and at times it’s hard to tell what is voice and what is violin. The poem may be about folklore tales but the music is modern and really good.

One of the tales from the saga is told in English about Kjartan, a boy with extraordinary gifts of civilization:
I saw a seal poke his head up through the floor,
I saw a half moon fly from door to door,
I saw a boy in the blood pools by the trees,
A singing skull said that boy is me.