Finlandia
Up early this morning and off into St Ann’s to assist with the music. Charles is playing a ‘Fugue, Canzone, and Epilogue’ by German composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert. He played a bit of it for me yesterday and I’m looking forward to hearing it again. After the organ opening (in what *looks like* F# major…), there comes a part for violin and also female chorus. They sing the last line of the creed, “I believe in the life everlasting”. I’ll be turning pages.
I’m going to be having another crack at leading the congregation in a hymn, too: the mighty ‘Finlandia’ by Jean Sibelius. It’s a poignant hymn and its stoic words are very fitting for Remembrance Sunday. One of the most prominent features of St Ann’s is its memorial to those who died in The Great War – the names flank the altar. I often look at them as I sit up beside the organ console. One is a Wilson, one is a Dobbin (my step-father’s name).
The memorial in St Stephen’s church (which lost as many of its young men) is to the side of the church. Consider the painful discussions that must have gone on in churches all over these islands.
Be still, my soul…
Watch “Lake Street Dive Plays “I Want You Back” On a Boston Sidewalk” on YouTube
Watch “New Dublin Voices, Obla Di Obla Da” on YouTube
You must remember this…
I’m in Spain with New Dublin Voices – we’re staying in a lovely town by the sea called Garautz, and the competition is taking place in a town about 45 mins south, Tolosa. It’s the first time I’ve visited Euskadia, ‘the Basque country’.
Two of the pieces we performed yesterday in the ‘folk’ competition were in the Basque language – one of them based on folk rhythms and which proved very tough to learn by heart. The music was easy enough, and it helped to have a strong ‘earworm’ to hang the words on.
It’s funny how memorization happens. Most of the task is repetition and using as many tricks as possible to come at it from different angles, because it’s obviously necessary to do most of the learning outside the precious rehearsal time. I found the input from other choir members really useful in the past few days. Not even ‘input’, more a shared concentration – literally going over the words beside someone else doing the same thing. Sharing little ways to link phrases in the memory. There’s something about the ‘hothouse’ environment of a competition that focuses everyone.
We’ve one more rehearsal now, for a gig tonight (the competition performances are over now…results tonight).
Addendum: we got 3rd prize! 1st was a choir from Ukraine, 2nd was a French choir. Next thing on the horizon, our concert in Christ Church Cathedral on the 18th.
I was meant to be a composer
Dublin today
Things I saw walking from the end of the 31 bus route over to Aston Quay to get the 39a out to my piano students:
Poster and rehearsal photos on the wall of The Abbey Theatre for ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, directed by Neil Bartlett. I love the pics they put up – all around the outside of the building – actors are so dynamic! Hope to get along to see the production. The quote they’ve selected for the poster is “No civilised man regrets a pleasure”…
Next, just at the end of the road the Abbey is on (Marlborough Street), is the most prominent building project in the city at the moment, the New road bridge across the Liffey. It will eventually carry the long-awaited Luas track that will join up the Red and Green lines, but I’m hoping it might also allow an extension of the 31 from Howth over to the Southside…
Next, on O’Connell Bridge, stood a slightly sad looking man with some small, fanned-out business cards in his hand. I didn’t see what they were, nor did I stop.
At the end of the traffic island that runs down the bridge was a group of men with an expensive film camera. One of them had a clapper board that informed me they were shooting ‘The F Word’. I admit I looked around for Daniel Radcliffe, who’s in town filming it (and partying randomly with the victorious Dublin Minors team the other night, apparently). He was not to be seen: I suppose they were just shooting exteriors; establishing-shots and so on…
…and now I’m off to teach piano until I head out to Navan for the second night of Les Misérables in the Solstice Arts Centre.
Watch “Ray Charles – What’d I Say (France 1968).mpg” on YouTube
Shenandoah
I’m accompanying the senior choir of Wesley College at a Feis Ceoil thing on Monday. One of the pieces they’re singing is a Bob Chilcott arrangement of the lovely American folk song, ‘Shenandoah’.
If you know the song, it only has one note for the -doah part of the word. Got me thinking about the word, which I’d presumed to be from a Native American language. If you elide those last two syllables (as the song’s word-setting suggests), though, it takes on a very French sound. As I understand it, the word is commonly pronounced with all the syllables: Shen-an-do-ah. The song hints at an earlier, more French pronunciation: Shen-an-dwah.
Any thoughts / actual facts?! A cursory browse of Wikipedia didn’t provide me with any clues, so I turn to you good people…
The Dark Knight Rises
Such an enjoyable film! These are just some scattered thoughts.
This most recent take on the Batman story by director Christopher Nolan has been characterised by its brilliant baddies. A deep-seated desire for revenge fuels every one of the characters who rise above the throng of Gotham to engage in the struggle for its soul, and deception is very much the weapon of choice.
Despite having seen promo shots of Anne Hathaway in a catsuit, I was still delightfully surprised at her deft handling of the mask of Catwoman’s character. Gone is the weirdness and slight supernatural flavour given to the character Michelle Pfeiffer so memorably embodied. Here is a truly suitable partner for Bruce Wayne.
Perhaps it’s just my overactive crossword cortex, but I wondered at the link between her name, Selina Kyle, and the apt adjective ‘slinky’!
Bane was amazing. A true monster, right down to his buried heart. The tenderness with which his mask is repaired by the object of his affection was beautiful.
A few musical things stood out. The music that plays at Miranda Tate’s charity benefit (to which Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle dance) is Ravel’s gorgeous ‘Pavane pour une infante défunte’, which translates as ‘Funeral music for a dead princess’. Later in the film, we learn just how much the death of a princess has brought about Gotham’s apocalypse.
There is a great moment, as Bruce Wayne fails in his second attempt to escape his prison, when the tensely pulsing strings suddenly chug to an embarrassed slower tempo. An extremely satisfying musical joke, pitched perfectly, as was all the humour in the film. (Sweeping generalisation, perhaps…your thoughts?)
Lovely reappearance by Cillian Murphy, who gets a great line as he pronounces sentence on an unfortunate victim. The hint of scarecrow in his costume was bang on.
One last thing I noticed was how the timescale of this trilogy is believable. There aren’t endless villains, nor is there endless time. A man – for that is what Batman is, after all – has but a short time to live. As remarkable as Bruce Wayne’s physical transformation is during the course of the film, he is not superhuman. There is a limit to personal vendetta. But, as this Olympic year has shown us, there is always a fresh generation of achievement, a fresh hunger to carry the ancient fire of the gods.
jay wilson :: music 