so, concert on the run

So this prolific and rather ubiquitous British group of six male solo singers (you can't call them a sextet: that sounds wrong), by name The King's Singers, are premiering a major new work by a local composer last Wednesday, and the publicist pings my editor a couple days in advance and says, "Hey, aren't you going to have someone cover this?" Note that they really want to read about the concert a few days later.

So the query goes out to the staff and the job falls on me, probably because I'm easily available and am a patsy for just about anything. Thus I haul myself up to the City, stopping to pick up an athenais on the way, because I figure this is the sort of thing she'd be up for (about which I'm righter than I knew), and we settle in to take a listen.

So my evaluation consists largely of getting lightly analytical in attempting to describe, in my semi-trained way, what this rather complicated music actually sounds like. Fortunately, if the new work is tough, the Saint-Saëns I have heard before, and those Elizabethan madrigals are pretty much of a (familiar) kind. Well, the copy editor enjoyed reading it.

So, a couple secrets of the review.

1) Description of the singers' voices was aided considerably by listening to their interstitial* talk. Those precise BBC-announcer voices, those deadpan jokes, that elegant self-deprecation ("Please wait until the end of the last piece to applaud, if you care to applaud" - after all, we must not try to pressure you by assumptions; that wouldn't be British), and above all those trained Oxbridge accents. When they sing music from the Renaissance, it's not the REN-uh-sonce that we have over here. Oh, no, it's the reh-NAY-sohnce. Well! And if the lyrics to a madrigal have images of an icy landscape, it's covered in glassiers, a word that actually took me a moment to figure out.

2) Oh help, the last set of the concert required me to turn into a pop music reviewer. Weelkes and Saint-Saëns I know, but when you put me on the likes of Randy Newman and Billy Joel, I'm a little at sea. Well, at least I had heard "Short People" before, which judging from the laughs it got a lot of the audience probably hadn't, but I had to hie home afterwards and let YouTube come to my rescue to provide standard recordings of "Goodnight, My Angel" and "Chanson d’Amour" before I had anything to compare the King's Singers renditions with to judge what they'd done with them. No, the ham they made out of the latter is not on the old hit recordings; I'd wondered about that.

*I've been waiting for a chance to use that word