a good day...

[perlmonger]

We went out shopping (being as we were all vegged out) late morning, and had brunch with Saturday's Grauniad at Cafe Ceiturica in Southville, a bit of Bristol that gets more gentrified by the day. ramtops had an all day breakfast; I had a rather good South Persian fish curry, cooked in fresh fenugreek, coriander and tamarind with saffron rice - very nice it was, and ramtops reported that her ossidge contained genuine pig products. Bread, conc. juice and choccie from the wholefood shop over the road, veg from the greengrocer, some odd bits from Aldi and home via the car wash (the Xantia was still wearing the late autumnal tree remnants it had picked up being parked in the back drive and, even apart from that, was filthy).

So to home, and a bit of gentle LJ-catching-up and coding for the afternoon. Tonight, we went to St Mary Redcliffe for a concert by the Bristol Phoenix Choir. , starting with Marc-Antoine Charpentier's Messe de Minuit pour Noël, which didn't bode all that well: it seemed under-rehearsed, and painfully off-key in places and wasn't helped by a typo in the programme - "Even the Angus Dei skips along quite merrily" which led my overactive imagination to picture Jesus prancing around in shorts...

This was followed by Sam Adams-Nye (a boy soprano from the Bristol Cathedral Choir) performing a version of the Tanu Song yclept I would be true with words by H A Walter and J T Wenham. The boy done good, I think, and followed with an unprogrammed song that was immediately familiar and which neither ramtops nor I can immediately remember the identity of. Oh well.

Next up was a (good) reading, by one Bonnie Hurren, of Siegfried Sassoon's poem Everyone Sang, followed by what for me was the highlight of the evening: a commissioned piece for the choir by local composer Mark Lawrence called The singing will never be done. The subject of the piece was the Chistmas Day Truce of 1914; I'll quote from the programme:

The Singing opens with a distant rumble from the organ pedals, reminding us of suspended hostilities. The choir sets the scene in slow-moving chords, until a dance-like movement takes over, the men's voices in close harmony, recounting the events of the truce while the women become the increasingly accusing voice of authority with their 'fraternisation with the enemy'.

The second half is a setting of the same Sassoon poem, and builds to a climax with repetitions of 'the singing will never be done'. The audience loved it, and the composer received an impressive and well deserved ovation when he went up to give a bow. I only hope that the recording of the night being made (I presume the Calrec on a stand in the middle of the aisle wasn't there for show) will be released at some point soon.

The first half ended with Britten's Ceremony of Carols, which are very fine, but I felt that after the previous piece, the choir were idling to an extent again. It was good enough, but the music deserved better.

After a (cold) mince pie and plastic cup of (cold) punch - not inspiring, but included in the entry price - we resumed with three Czech Carols (Chtíc, aby spal, Hvězda svítila nad Betlehem and Narodil se Kristus Pán; apologies for any misspelling there) and Adolphe Adam's O Holy Night, with tenor soloist Pavel Josifek whose fine voice reached Bristol via the Janáček Opera Chorus and Czech Philharmonic Chorus, both of Brno. Then we had an organ improvisation on St Mary's fine, if Bloody Stupid Johnson, organ; variations on Adeste Fidelis with, over the final two thirds, a deep and (hopefully :) conscious homage to Genesis that had ramtops and me grinning at each other. Huge fun.

The final piece, and what caught ramtops' attention in the first place (she sang it herself in years gone bye) was Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, sung in Hebrew in Bernstein's own reduction of the orchestration for harp, organ and percussion. There were a couple of places where the choir hung on by the skin of their teeth (where does that expression come from?), but they made it and very, very fine it was too. We were baffled that a few of the audience left before the end; I mean, what's going on there? What's not to like about Bernstein? All in all, a perfect end to an excellent evening and a very good day.

A final coda at home consisting of composing this screed and sipping a glass of wine: I'm done now, so off to make the necessary pot of tea so we have cups to go to sleep with (whether we drink it now or no), and glasses of juice for Liessa to lap away at as she will overnight.

Goodnight all.