The choral equivalent of neighbours from heaven helped Arminta Wallacekeep pace with preparations and a live performance with the Kilkenny Festival Chorus
IT’S THE ULTIMATE in audience participation. Forget about sitting in the front row at the circus, or talking back to the radio when you’re stopped at traffic lights: this is the real McCoy. Join a choir on a Tuesday, rehearse for the rest of the week, and hey presto! You’re performing in a full-on live gig, singing with orchestra and soloists at one of the country’s top arts festivals.
Some 64 amateur singers have travelled from all over Ireland – from Gorey, from Galway, from Cork, from Blessington, from Belfast even – to join the Kilkenny Festival Chorus. Several have taken holidays to do it. They have spent a week in workshops and rehearsals with the conductor Fergus Sheil, getting close up and personal with Beethoven's Choral Fantasyand Rossini's Stabat Mater, cramming what would normally take several months of preparation into five high-octane days.
Though it’s a regular feature of arts festivals in the UK and Europe, it’s the first time this kind of project has been mounted in Kilkenny, and the end-of-week concert at St Canice’s Cathedral is eagerly awaited in a city with a strong choral tradition. There’s a strong representation from a local group, The Kilkenny Choir, but the singers come from all age groups and musical traditions. A girl with blonde hair cascading down her back used to sing with Anúna until she went off to study drama full-time. Another slip of a thing is a jazz singer.
What they share is enthusiasm, dedication and an infectious enjoyment of singing. Most have learned their parts thoroughly in advance of the first rehearsal. Some have sung one, or both, of the works before. Nearly all can, if push comes to shove, negotiate a four-part score at sight. It’s all a bit daunting for this reporter, who is to join the choir on the last-but-one day of rehearsals, who has never heard either of the pieces before and who – if she had – would certainly never have contemplated singing a note of either one.
The Beethoven turns out to be mostly a piano piece, all sparkle and mischief and chasing its tail: or as the internet puts it, “a theme and variations enclosed in the form of an irregular, transcendent lied.” It ends with orchestra, chorus and piano getting together to belt out a great joyous hymn to the civilising power of art.
Rossini's madly OTT setting of the Stabat Mater, meanwhile, could have been designed for the opera house, with its diddly-diddly rhythms, vocal curlicues and explosive fugal finale.
The latter is in full flow when I arrive for my first rehearsal on Friday afternoon. I open my gleaming new score – and promptly lose my place. The music whizzes by like a high-speed train.
MY NEIGHBOUR TAKES pity on me; without missing a beat, she points out the place and we hurtle on across thickets of quavers and semiquavers. The phrase we are singing, I gradually realise, is in sempiterna – which is Latin for “to him be glory”. It’s definitely not “it simply tears on” – which is what it sounded like when I was listening to it on my iPod while walking the dog in the park.
Mesmerised, I gaze at the English italics, which run underneath the Latin, which runs under the alto line, which is the second from the top of a six-line score. At once, I lose my place again. Luckily I have the choral equivalent of neighbours from heaven; Mary O’Flynn on one side, and Claire MacDonald on the other. They offer encouragement, they show me where to write in the conductor’s marks, when to turn pages, when we’re supposed to stand and when to sit down again.
When we finally skid to a stop, Fergus Sheil smiles his patient smile. “Okay, it’s sounding good,” he declares. “But by the time we get to bar six on page 80, Amen Lethargy Syndrome has set in. You need to keep the suspense going all the way along those long lines of Amens.” Back at in sempiterna, we work on a tricky chunk of counterpoint in which the melody is handed from basses to tenors to sopranos to altos. We sing it in turn, one bar at a time. Instead of chasing after the music I feel, for a few brief but glorious moments, that I’m inside it.
At 2.15pm on the day of the performance, chaos reigns inside St Canice’s. A 36-strong orchestra has materialised, as have four soloists, assorted music stands, lighting experts, a grand piano and a partridge in a pear tree. Actually, scrub the partridge. There isn’t room to swing a partridge, let alone squeeze in a pear tree. You wouldn’t want to be claustrophobic.
There's a great deal of clattering, hammering and shunting around of music stands. This, apparently, is what is known as a dress rehearsal. It's disturbingly close to mayhem. And then Sheil raises his arms, and Finghin Collins plays the opening chords of the Choral Fantasy, which were once played by Beethoven himself, imagine, and the orchestra answers, and something magical happens.
It’s like watching a tree grow. No. It’s like being the tree, putting out branches and leaves in three dimensions. And some of the branches are exquisite.
Three movements into the Rossini, two of the soloists, mezzo Bridget Knowles and soprano Aileen Itani, join forces to appease a wrathful God. Their voices rise and fall, silver and gold, in shimmering perfection. The fact that the soprano is heavily pregnant adds to the poignancy of what she’s singing about – Mary’s desolation after the execution of her son by crucifixion.
AFTER FOUR HOURS of dress rehearsal we’re beginning to feel less like trees and more like wilting violets. With an hour to go, it’s time to get into our black togs – and suddenly the nave is crammed with people and there’s no more time to look over the sticky corners or hum the tricky bits or wish each other luck. The awesome stone ceiling is glowing violet and sapphire. The conductor raises his arms. The cathedral goes very quiet. We’re on.
The concert itself is over in a flash. It seems to have gone well. The audience is happy; the applause is warm. It has, the members of the Kilkenny Festival Chorus agree, been a fantastic experience. “Not bad,” jokes bass Anthony Doyle, “for a load of people dragged in off the street last Tuesday”.
Not bad? Make that pretty good.
Jubilant, the festival choir troops off to the pub to celebrate – and to raise a glass to next year’s Kilkenny Festival Chorus.
