The Early Music Festival at Keble College

Every year in Oxford at Keble College there is a big music festival of early music where nightly musical performances take place in the college’s beautiful chapel. This year groups visited to sing and play Renaissance and Baroque music, such as the Tallis Scholars singing Praetorius and Schütz. The choir have their regular services during the week but we focus on earlier music as well. We sang a very difficult Bach motet at Wednesday Evensong, and much of our music is early to begin with, but the festival culminates in a large work sung by the choir on Saturday, the final day of the festival.

This year we sang the 1610 Vespro della Beata Virgine (Vespers) by Claudio Monteverdi, a choral work of about 90 mins that sets to music the Latin texts used at Vespers, or evening prayer. Some small ensembles came to play with us, groups that specialize in early instruments and performing with them. We’d been rehearsing for this concert since the start of this term, so the past 5-6 weeks or so. The concert was extremely successful, and we were all relieved for it to be over with.

Rehearsals and concerts are both tiring but in different ways. In rehearsals, you repeat passages over and over so that you learn them and know them, and the amount of repetition is what can be most tiring. In the Monteverdi, there are many passages where the choir sing extremely long, still lines where we have to make it seem like we’re not taking breaths even though we are, so as not to “break” the sound. Rehearsing these lines and repeating them was certainly tiring. In the performance, however, the real emotion of the music finally comes in. The conductor of a choir can show you and tell you about some of the emotion in rehearsals, but it is not until the concert that you see how they want to shape the music. Therefore as singers we put the most effort into the singing, and devote ourselves to conveying the expression of the music. In addition a large work feels more like a journey in concert than in rehearsal because the parts all come together, whereas in rehearsal they are all separated and often scattered based on difficulty.

Here is a link to my favorite moment of the piece, in fact the ending, in which the final Gloria Patri (Glory be to the Father) is sung. The sopranos sing its chant melody in augmentation, meaning very slowly and drawn out, while two tenor soloists, one on stage and one off, embellish on the text in call-and-response: https://youtu.be/S99FCAFNgaA?t=5823 (the rest of the work can be watched in this video as well)

And here is a photo taken during the concert from the back of Keble College Chapel. I am very lucky to be able to sing in this space three times a week, and performing the Monteverdi Vespers was an experience I will never forget!