Madeline attends a concert by the King's College Choir

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on March 26, 2017 at 10:42:45

When we were in Europe in 1980, we went to King's College Chapel, Cambridge, to listen to the King's College Choir on their home turf, so to speak. It was one of the few musical things we did on that particular trip, and we enjoyed it immensely. In general however, neither of us are fans of choirs with boy sopranos and altos (surprising in Madeline's case, since her aunt founded the San Francisco Boys Choir). The King's College Choir was recently on tour however, and Madeline decided she wanted to attend their concert in Berkeley. Since she didn't want to go with me to Pouty Lips' (Alina Ibragimova's) recital in SF (coming up soon BTW!), I didn't want to attend the King's College Choir concert in Berkeley. (Was I being passive agressive here? Probably so!) Unfortunately, the location had also changed from the wonderful First Congregational Church (recently damaged by fire) to Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley - a location whose acoustics are electronically manipulated on each concert - ugh! So she went with a friend instead.

So she gets there, and it turns out that this King's College Choir concert has a "warm-up" band performing first - in the form of selections sung by the Pacific Boychoir. Like the King's College Choir, the Pacific Boychoir has adult men singing the tenor and bass parts as necessary, and, overall, it was an excellent "opening act".

Then the King's College Choir finally comes out on stage and performs - mostly a cappella, except for Faure's Cantique de Jean Racine where they used their accompanist on the piano, as well as a few other selections where there was discreet organ accompaniment. But what was strange however was that they also had the accompanist play a piano solo, and this piano solo was itself kind of strange: it was the "Le Gibet" (middle) movement from Ravel's "Gaspard de la nuit". To me, this slow-moving evocation of a hanging corpse just seems a very weird thing to play as your only piano solo on a concert.

Madeline's sense was that the performances by the Pacific Boychoir were actually better than those by the King's College Choir - mainly because certain individual voices among the King's Choristers kept popping out of the texture. The Pacific Boychoir sounded more disciplined and homogeneous. (Although, god knows, this could have been the result of the sonic manipulation that regularly goes on in Zelerbach, as I already mentioned.)

So, all in all, it was a strange night, which included a warm-up act choir that sounded better than the featured choir and a very strange piano solo in the middle of it all! You don't always know what you're going to get when you attend concerts these days.

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Topic - Madeline attends a concert by the King's College Choir - Chris from Lafayette 10:42:45 03/26/17 (1)

RE: Madeline attends a concert by the King's College Choir - desertorganist 16:15:13 04/01/17 (0)

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