A Conductor’s Summer
Our Music Director Benjamin Kirk gives an account of his busy summer in 2023 and the exciting things he got up to.
July 2023
A cathedral weekend away in St Davids cathedral in Wales with the Lea Singers – my latest appointment as MD – meant I was able to work through July. We had finished the season on 1st July with a huge performance of Rachmaninoff’s Divine Liturgy of St John of Chrysostom, celebrating 150 since the composer’s birth. Then began rehearsals with a smaller group for St Davids at the end of the month, with music by Thomas Tomkins (who hails from St Davids), Jonathan Dove, and Roxanna Panufnik. It was delightful to have this time in Wales getting to know my newest choir; every choir has a social raison d’etre as well as a musical one, and this is part of what makes touring such an essential, fun part of being a choral musician.
August 2023
This project began in August 2019 during the Arvo Pärt Days Festival in Tallinn, Estonia, with a concert performance (not staged) of the chamber opera Clemency, conducted by the composer. Sir James MacMillan was making his conducting debut with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, conducting an Old Testament double-bill of Arvo Pärt’s When Sarah was 90 years old, followed by his own 2010 chamber opera on the same story.
The synopsis is simple enough: Abaraham and Sarah are visited by three mysterious travellers, whom Abarham welcomes into his tent and out of the scorching heat. Grateful for their hospitality, the three Triplets sing together that in a year they will return, and that Sarah will have borne a son. Sarah is 90 years old in this story, and hearing this news she laughs. Isaac, her son, means The one who laughs.
Following this happy scene, the opera takes a darker turn, as it becomes clear to Abraham and Sarah that these three angels are making their way to Sodom and Gamorrah, to exercise violent judgement on these sinful towns. The rest of the opera sees Abraham haggling with the Triplets, asking “Suppose you find in these towns fifty acts of selflessness, will you spare the towns?” Abaraham pleads with the angels for clemency.
The original concert performance in 2019 was intended to pave the way for staged performances in Estonia in 2020 – and so this August we were fulfilling a long pipe dream of the festival, with the same cast:
Conductor: Sir James MacMillan
Stage rehearsals began on 1st August under Lembit Peterson, a famed Estonian stage director making his opera directing debut. The venue for this performance was Lembit’s own theatre, Theatrum (on Vene street, in the heart of Tallinn’s Old Town). On 7th August Sir James MacMillan arrived with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, and four successful performances later, we are talking about touring with this production in Bavaria.
After returning from Estonia on a real high from these performances of Clemency, I joined the Rodolfus Course in Oxford, where I was accompanying singing lessons by the excellent Dan Ludford-Thomas. The course directors were Ralph Allwood and Sarah MacDonald, with a guest invitation from Steven Grahl, whose stunning evensong in Christ Church Cathedral was one highlight of the week for me.
During the course I was privileged to speak at length with the other singing teachers on the course, Giles Underwood and Nicki Kennedy, about performance anxiety, singing technique, choir etiquette, and the education system. I am no Vladimir Ashkenazy when it comes to my piano playing, but I enjoyed this time hugely – and this was only the third time in my lifetime when I had earned any money from my piano playing.
One evening during the course, we entertained the students with a Ralph Allwood special: Whatever’s Next? – where the students ask staff members everything about life post school, about professional journeys and such. It was here that Giles Underwood spoke about the importance of having a portfolio career: not only doing performance, but also reaching out into other domains such as teaching, speaking, writing, accompanying, composing, arranging, directing, managing – as it becomes more and more unusual to sustain a career doing surviving on only one skill.
I have rather enjoyed it!
– Benjamin Kirk