GRAaaaaaaaah!

Can’t the Proms turn out some professionals to do the choral parts in the annual Beethoven 9? Trained singers are booked to do the early music, opera and new music bits, so why not the big choral repertoire? The cost is not prohibitive – the stage is filled with pros for many other Proms and during the Stockhausen day last year the stage and most of the arena was filled with highly-trained musicians who were being paid – so it must be a matter of priorities. How hard would it be to get in the BBC Singers, the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir and then a load of students from the Royal College next door? You wouldn’t even have to pay the students for goodness sake (give them course credits – the oldest trick in the book). Trained singers are going begging all over the UK for the measliest of gigs – I’m not suggesting that they should be exploited, I’m lamenting their underuse.

I had the opportunity to take a guest to the SSO/CBSO Chorus Beethoven 9 at the proms the other day. I wanted to take a friend who used to play trumpet for one of the German opera houses, but I suspected, since the BBC hadn’t engaged professionals to sing the choral part, that those bits would be over-mannered and under-powered, in the manner of amateur choruses the world over. The CBSO chorus is an admirable choir, but on the whole I wasn’t wrong, so it was a good job that I took someone else who wouldn’t hold me personally to account for the BBC’s apparent disdain for this masterwork.

It is impossible to find someone to blame, and it is difficult to know which came first – the embarrassingly low standards or the institutional contempt for choral singing.

Let’s go back to basics here. Singing and playing a violin are roughly analogous activities from a consumer point of view. The more talented you are, the better you sound. Practice also helps. Contrary to the consensus of the twentieth century, singing once a week in an amateur choral environment does not equip you to handle choral masterpieces to a professional standard. Doing this in large numbers does not bypass the problem.

Barlines is a huge enthusiast of amateur choirs. We have conducted dozens, of all different types. We love them. However it is clear to us that any properly trained male voice, for example, could drown out, with the sweetest of tones, the tenor and bass sections of any non-professional choir in the UK with his back turned and without breaking a sweat. We have seen it done, by various people in a number of prejudicial environments. He could then proceed to diminuendo, crescendo, exert emphasis and generally emote in ways simply unavailable to the others, due to having been trained a lot in those exact things. It is analogous, in fact, to the difference between a professional violinist and an amateur violinist. Can anyone imagine a scenario where a professional orchestra would replace its violin section with amateurs?

This is rather cruel, but it really has to be done. Here is last week’s prom performance (available on t’iPlayer till Saturday evening). Skip to 56 mins 44 seconds. Witness people singing. Then listen to this clip (from the beginning) of a Bernstein performance and witness singers singing:

On the evening what brought it home was the pivotal F natural/A dyad on ‘vor Gott’ – at this point the audience should be blown away by the raw harmony, the universe should stand still, the ethereal tendrils of eternal brotherhood should grasp you by the balls etc, but Volkov dispatched it with a crispness typical of the performance. It was consistent, and certainly provided a good springboard for his swift reading of the ensuing alla Marcia, but I am certain that the limitations of the chorus influenced his entire approach to the final movement.

Listen back a bit on the iPlayer and tell me that this is good enough for the UK’s flagship Beethoven 9 performance.