Fifty years with the South West (on and off)
One of our longest-serving sopranos has now been singing with the South West Choral Society for fifty years. Here she shares some memories of a half-century in the choir.
Most years I ‘file’ Jan’s summer letter with a loose pile of letters from previous years, concert programmes, flyers, itineraries for choir trips, accounts and balance sheets on top of the piano. In this strange, silent year there was no summer letter but the filing reminds me that this autumn I clocked up fifty years singing with the choir.
In autumn 1970 a neighbour, John Baird, had started conducting the choir and needed singers. I enjoyed the choral singing I’d had a taste of at school so went along with my father to the Bec School. Either Martin or Penny, John’s wife, accompanied – and I have a memory that Martin dealt with concert management. I must have been the youngest of a group of what felt to me quite formidable women, particularly the altos. The choir survived with a tenor section of only four for many years but we usually managed eight or so basses. But I stuck with it and enjoyed it and did a stint on the committee. My Letrasetted flyers and posters from the early eighties look old-fashioned and desperately unprofessional in the depths of that pile.
As Bob told us lately, John could be an irascible conductor and at some point in my early years with the choir we were doing the Bruckner motets in a concert at Fulham Town Hall. We didn’t manage to pick up our notes and made a right mess of the start – John flung down his baton, and left the room. He mellowed as he aged and one of my favourite memories is the contrasting conducting styles demonstrated by John and Martin at the scratch Messiah we joined to raise funds for Mary Magdalene’s church roof. Anyone who sang that day and didn’t know both conductors must have been a little bemused: John urged us to listen to each other and hardly gave us a beat, while Martin had a much more definite style and way of keeping us together in some of the elaborate and tricky choruses – no going astray.
Rehearsal spaces have varied widely and wildly, from the tranquillity of the Bec School hall, wood panelled and facing west with the evening sun streaming through the windows on the honours boards, to the austere concrete of Ernest Bevin school hall on same site where sometimes as the accompanist opened the piano a mouse would run out . . . Then adult education moved us to Chestnut Grove’s drama hall where there was no natural light and such a deadening acoustic that we were routinely shocked by the noise we could make when let loose in a church for a concert. We often joined together with the United Hospitals Choir and I remember going to rehearse in an amazing room at one of the London hospitals – I think it must have been the Great Hall at Barts. Balham Baptist Church, our rehearsal space once we devolved from adult education, has been something of a haven.
I have sung with the choir in such a range of venues: carols in the Arndale when we were unable to get the piped music turned off, the cavernous and very chilly church in Hammersmith where Ernie (Jan’s husband) wrestled with a heater that looked like an Apollo rocket and was just as noisy laid up the central aisle, Tewkesbury Abbey for Caroline’s wedding, the chapel at Strawberry Hill (the modern college not Walpole’s house), Westminster Abbey where we sang Verdi’s Requiem and felt the shock of singing a top C at the end and hearing it coming back seven seconds later. Then there was the bouncy, and very high, organ loft at a church in Calais where we worried that Martin, backing up to a very low parapet to conduct, might fall over to the nave floor a long way below.
We’ve done, I think, fourteen foreign trips since the early nineties. My favourite concert is probably the one in the cathedral at St Omer on our first trip – the audience consisted of three people and a dog and they were the most appreciative and attentive listeners (the dog was very patient). I have never been as cold as we were that evening. We shivered so much that they turned the moveable gas heaters on us and grilled us nicely for the second half.
Before a more recent foreign trip our former female accompanist warned the new incumbent who was coming with us ‘watch out – they drink like fish’ – and I have to admit there is some truth in that.
Perhaps the most important memories are about people. The choir, for me, has been a family affair as my Dad sang with the South West for some years. My youngest sister, Kate, joined later when the choir had a few more tenors and she found her husband, Nich, in their ranks. My husband, Fred, loyally attends concerts and, over the years my children have come too. Harriet sat through Messiah at All Saints in Tooting when she was all of six and Kate’s daughter Tabitha slept through a Mozart requiem at St Lukes when she was under six months.
One choir member, who still sings with us, told me once that she wouldn’t have got through early motherhood without the choir, ‘I’d have gone mad without Monday nights’. Here’s hoping we can get back to singing together next year and ward off any encroaching insanity.