Let the Peoples Sing

[ardcarp]

Louise Fryer presents the grand final of Let the Peoples Sing 2011, the international competition for amateur choirs

Radio 3 Sunday 16th October at 6.30pm

Here's a chance to get out of our 'choral evensong' groove and to hear some singing from different traditions. And no Aled in sight!

[amateur51]

Radio 3 Sunday 16th October at 6.30pm

Here's a chance to get out of our 'choral evensong' groove and to hear some singing from different traditions. And no Aled in sight!

Lovely!

[DracoM]

Yipee!!

Remember when R3 used to cover round after round of both this and the UK series, with judgements. Hey ho!
I'll have to LA it.

[ardcarp]

Heard the yoof finals...and the Estonian choir won. Will have to LA the adult part...family distractions! It was fascinating to hear the Bulgarian choir with their hard sound and the sort of 'trillo' they do from time to time. All choirs fantastically well-drilled and blended. All girls/young women, I think. As Draco says, it's a great pity not to hear the earlier rounds. You don't get to hear the whole field, and come the finals, there isn't really a cigarette paper between the contestants.
Pity too that it isn't televised. However, one plus is that the judges apparently listen in a separate room via speakers. They cannot therefore be influenced by presentation (e.g. silly gyrations) which IMO is right and proper.

[Vile Consort]

So those choirs that do silly actions won't be penalised? Pity.

[decantor]

90 mins or more of first-class a cappella choral singing - tight discipline, dead-centre tuning, musicality in abundance on mostly virtuoso repertoire. Yet these were amateur choirs. So in what way could the professionals do better? Learned the works with less rehearsal, perhaps? The Skando-Baltic tradition, whether ham or pro, seems to have the genre stitched up, and they do it - joy upon joy! - without resort to vibrato to colour their timbre.

I almost wearied of perfection tonight. Hands up if you would have welcomed the chance to be on the jury.

[rauschwerk]

No British choirs in sight, I suppose?

[ardcarp]

Hands up if you would have welcomed the chance to be on the jury.

Not likely! Whilst music competritions are good in one sense, they are awful in another, i.e. having to make what comes down to an arbitrary choice between near-perfect offerings.

The Skando-Baltic tradition, whether ham or pro, seems to have the genre stitched up

They do up to a point. But the repertoire largely comes from that tradition..and one wonders whther they would do (for instance) French Baroque, German Romantic or English Renaissance quite so well. (I haven't heard the adult mixed yet).

[DracoM]

Yes, the repertoire seemed pretty circumscribed and lacked much variety for my money. Skando-Baltic seems to have become the default / benchmark criterion in ensembles like this? is that where the most innovative choir music for youth / children's choirs is being written these days? It would seem so. Loved the vibrato-less, technical mastery all round.

Terrific competence, discipline, even regimentation within the repertoires a-plenty. BUT a particular series of very hard, very driven sounds in the youth / children choirs that felt coercive, with driving rhythms that in a sense became the piece rather than supporting the piece. A good many had strings of nonsense sounds constructed to be fiercely rhythmic in themselves. I don't have the relevant languages enough to know how many of those syllable strings are actually organic to the languages the choirs usually use, but it got pretty repetitively tedious.

Of the youth etc class, the Tallinn Music High School ensemble seemed far and away the most expressive, musical, and varied in tone, timbre and style. The US choir did IMO disappointingly routine stuff - all that stamping and clapping in a radio competition? erm....! All done with great confidence, yes indeed, but just a series of 'pieces' they'd rehearsed to death. The Swedish Choir were good, but just a touch insipid, not quite sure where they were pitching.

Later, I liked the Danish Voice Line group, but just not in this competition. A deal of what they did was sort of R2, expert, slick, fantastic discipline but just not....I don't know, ur-Let the Peoples Sing

But that brings me to my fundamental question: does anyone know the rules, the entry parameters? And as said upthread, not a British choir in sight. Desperate. Why not??
Maybe the BBC will now see why broadcasting the British rounds as they very much used to do would offer very, very real incentives.

Sorry, I had to leave before the judgements were made. Winners were.....??

[Gabriel Jackson]

I haven't had a chance to lsten to this yet as I spent the weekend in... Scandinavia, working with the fantastic S:t Jacobs Chamber Choir in Stockholm (www.choir.nu).

The reason British choirs don't enter, or flourish, in "Let the peoples sing" is, surely, that they aren't good enough. The great strength of the British choral tradition is the professional choirs, and the cathedrals and college chapels. With a few exceptions, amateur choral singing in this country is not as good as it should be, or as it thinks it is. Sweden, for instance, which only has two professional choirs (the Radio Choir and the Eric Eridsson Chamber Choir) is much more dependent on amateur choirs to provide high-quality choral singing, and they rise to that challenge. I was very interested to learn that many members of the S:t Jacobs choir had studied singing and sung in choirs throughout their teenage years (and before that) in Stockholm's specialist music school.

BTW, Northern and Eastern European choirs don't sing without vibrato!

[rauschwerk]

The great strength of the British choral tradition is the professional choirs, and the cathedrals and college chapels. With a few exceptions, amateur choral singing in this country is not as good as it should be, or as it thinks it is.

This is what I have suspected for a long time, and I am saddened but not surprised to hear it from someone who is in a much better position than I to know it.

[DracoM]

Sadly, I think GJ is dead right on this.

UK amateur choirs simply are not good enough. Could it be partly because the model of British amateur choral singing is still rooted in an Edwardian model, the unreconstructed 'Sargent' / Huddersfield Ch Soc - or rather a relic of that? The singing that one hears coming back into the community from places like the Royal College / RNCM etc a la Sweden in GJ's example is one of very solo, high projection singing. But the choral singing techniques as heard in schools eg all over Estonia / Slovenia are utterly different.

The point about cathedral choirs in UK is surely that it has carefully nurtured homogeneity and focus, real attention to sound etc at the very heart of what DoMs do. Very few amateur conductors are anything like as concerned about voice production and are just damned glad to get the notes right. I think it may also come from the fact that unlike Estonia in their great national celebrations there is in UK no longer any remaining and living tradition of serious indigenous folk /community singing - and I don't mean football songs or bar room shouts. It would seem that in Scandinavia and Northern / Eastern European countries there is such

FWIW, for me, the BBC Singers are a brilliant bunch of individual singers with legendary sight-reading etc etc, but the professional equivalent in terms of sound of e a top quality WI choir. You always have the impression that each singer is striving to be heard almost as if they were auditioning for other gigs by showing what they can do, no matter what everyone else may be doing. Just an impression - not saying that is the case.....!!




NB: I thought the wonderful Swedish Radio Choir had been / is about to be disbanded?

[Gabriel Jackson]

No, the Swedish Radio Choir is not being disbanded. (Finnish radio got rid of their choir, sadly, a few years ago...).

Unsurprisingly, I can't agree about the BBC Singers. They are a very good group of singers who respond with great artistry and technical excellence to whatever demands are made of them, both in terms of the notes composers ask them to sing, and what conductors ask of them. Basically, they sing properly!

[DracoM]

< who respond with great artistry and technical excellence >

Oh dear! GJ, I more or less said exactly that. I just do not like the sound they make. I am in no way impugning their skills or virtue - if that's the way you like the sounds they make, all well and good.

[chorister49]

The reason British choirs don't enter, or flourish, in "Let the peoples sing" is, surely, that they aren't good enough. The great strength of the British choral tradition is the professional choirs, and the cathedrals and college chapels. With a few exceptions, amateur choral singing in this country is not as good as it should be, or as it thinks it is.

What a shame that you think this. There are many extremely good amateur choirs in the UK (even outside London!!) and lots and lots and lots of very good, good, mediocre and not so brilliant ones. Not only do they give people the opportunity to sing but their members keep choral music alive by putting on concerts, commissioning new works, going to other choral music concerts, buying CDs and downloads, reading message boards like this one... I wouldn't be in quite such a hurry to write them off!

There is also a very important distinction to be made between very good amateur choirs, and very good amateur choirs who enter competitions. My sense is that (apart from in Wales where there is a strong tradition of Eisteddfods) many UK-based choirs are not particularly driven to take part in competitions so you would need to go to hear their concerts to hear what brilliant work they are doing.