Yesterday was a beautiful Spring day in Edinburgh, which made me wish I hadn’t put my name down to sing in a Waverley Care fund-raising “Come and Sing” concert. I’d skipped the optional “note bashing” session as I knew both pieces in the concert, but it still meant half a day rehearsing and then singing.

Two surprises when I arrived at St.Cuthberts’ for the rehearsal. I found myself in a group of about twenty other tenors – not a bad turnout for an endangered species – but the church was packed with 350 other singers – the largest turnout ever for one of these events. So that was the pleasant surprise. The unpleasant surprise came when I opened the score for the second piece on the programme – Mozart’s Requiem. Even the words brought not a glimmer of recognition. I had never sung this before in my life. Oops.

So what had attracted all these singers? surely not the well-known Mozart? The other piece on the programme was Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna, which I had sung a couple of years ago and thoroughly enjoyed (I can’t say that about many late 20th century works). The organisers told us that there weren’t 370 loan copies of the score to be found in the UK. They had contacted the UK publishers, who contacted the US publishers, who then contacted the composer himself for permission to photocopy. So Lauridsen knew something was afoot in Edinburgh last night.

I’m not sure what he would have thought of the performance. The score encourages conductors to pull the tempo all over the place, and the CD I have shows exactly that, with a small tightly controlled choir showing how it’s done. 370 singers singing together for the first time, many singing the piece for the first time, form a pretty intractable beast, even for as conductor as personable as Stephen Doughty.

The undoubted highlight of the whole day for me was not the chorus, but the soloists in the Mozart – students from RSAMD – in particular the young soprano, Emilie Alford. From the moment she started singing the Benedictus in the rehearsal I was entranced. Her voice had a clarity and an authority that brought tears to my eyes. She may not be cut out for a career in reality TV, but she’s the finest Mozart soprano I have heard in a long long time. Well worth sacrificing a Spring day for.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 10:07 am and is filed under Singing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.