They came to mock...
Prior would not be Prior without Cambridge Voices and, of course, The Maestro. In this New Year Edition, we reprint, with kind permission of the West Gallery Music Association, an account of a previous 2003 Festival performance some of us may remember...
THE band had been asked to help with a concert of West Gallery music by Cambridge Voices for a village festival at Swaffham Prior, near Cambridge. This pretty little village has two churches in the one graveyard, and we were to perform in the West Gallery of the Georgian church of St Cyriac and St Julitta.
As a redundant church, everything but the gallery has been stripped out, which has the advantage that chairs can be set out for an audience to face the gallery, so things were looking good. However, there was no sign of conductor or choir. The festival organiser asked what time we had been told for the rehearsal: "because Ian's told some people 3 o'clock and others 3:30, and he's flying back from a concert tour in Germany, so I hope he'll make it. It's typical of him!".
Ian de Massini, conductor of Cambridge Voices, had been to visit me to discuss the music, so I was already aware of his eccentricities to some extent. His answerphone had advised me to ring his mobile "which is always on unless I'm rehearsing, or giving a concert, or having hanky-panky... Ooooh!" However, he was very charming and great fun and he had done West Gallery with his choir before, and was very taken with the Norfolk examples I offered him. With hindsight, warning bells should have rung when, flicking through the index of the red book, he pounced on the Psalm XLI paraphrase known affectionately as "Gordon's Bowels", Perhaps it was just as well that he didn't spot Spanking Rodger.
We were drinking tea in the organiser's kitchen next door to the church when, at 3.30 precisely, Ian appeared at the back door, exclaiming, come on! We're supposed to be rehearsing.
Cambridge Voices are internationally famous, and were well able to cope with the music on one short rehearsal, but it soon became apparent that the theme of the concert was Mocking West Gallery Music. Ian encouraged his singers to do greatly exaggerated, bleating trills, sing deliberately out of tune, and sing strident, "nasal" solos. However, I was pleased to notice that when he came to the Anthem Taken Out of the 67 Psalm from the Briston Manuscript, Ian announced that he wanted it "sung straight", as it was too good to spoil, and when he came to the hymn "Thee Will I Love" by John Wesley, sung to the Briston tune Bury, both he and the singers were quite overcome by its beauty, and he decided it should be sung gently, with solo flute accompaniment. Richard rose to the challenge with a beautiful rendition, liberally scattered with delightful "folky" grace notes and ornaments.
During the rehearsal I found it necessary to empty the condensation out of my serpent, and decided it was better to let it fall on the stone floor of the church below, rather than the wooden floor of the gallery. Ian was delighted, and insisted I did it during the performance.
We had been told to perform in Georgian dress, and after the rehearsal we discovered the choirs ideas of Georgian dress were, to say the least, unusual. Nothing, however, prepared us for Ian's costume for the performance. He appeared among us, as we gathered outside the church, dressed in one blue sandal and one red, trousers tucked into white woolly socks, a pink silk shirt, white cotton gloves, spiky gelled hair and bright red lipstick. Richard and I decided that he looked like a cross between a Macedonian shepherd and a gay traffic cop.
Ian's programme notes commenced with: "Maestro de Massini introduces each choir-member in turn, with each one then going up into the gallery after their humiliation", and after we had done that we performed our pieces, interspersed with bitchy comments from the Maestro, and West Gallery anecdotes read by the Reverend Roy Tricker, a retired canon with a genuine interest in church history. It was all very amusing, especially when I emptied my serpent over the front of the gallery at the precise moment that a lady usher walked out from underneath, but I was gratified afterwards to hear members of the audience, and even of the choir, saying that they would have preferred "less messing about", and to heard the music done straight.
We were invited to a splendid supper afterwards, where Vina drank two glasses of wine and giggled uncontrollably every time Ian said anything, and on the whole we all had a pleasant time, but I feel we need to go back some time, without the Maestro's influence, and do a proper concert of West Gallery music, to set the record straight.