- My four Epochs of Ipswich School Chapel Choir 1989 – 1996
Ipswich School was the public school I got of the six that I applied for and having got my place at first as a fee payer and then later as an Assisted Places Scholar when dad died in 1993. I auditioned for Ipswich School Chapel Choir in the first term in 1989 and got in straight away.
The Stephen Orton Era 1989 – 1990
My first choirmaster at Ipswich School was quite a good one. He was quite a famous musician Stephen Orton in Cambridge circles and also a chess player so I joined both his chapel choir and chess club at first.
I beat the girl who came third in the Suffolk Junior Chess Championships 1989 and that gave me a reasonable rating for an 11 year old of 978. Stephen rated 1000 as very good and I could have had 2 draws if I known the rules to right the moves down every time.
(a) The Chapel Choir Tour to Chevreuse near Paris the Week after the Cold War Ended 18 – 24 October 1989
Mugshot. I’m on the far right this time!
I think that was in the churchyard where we sung Catholic High Mass.
This was the team sheet for the tour. A few famous BBC names in there in Simon Wilcox, I believe George Double and certainly Stephen Trowell of the Magnets. Stephen Orton himself and his son Joe both now deceased sadly. Francis Goodhand now theatre director and son of my beloved English teacher John Goodhand, the Seatons and Lyons’s world class musician and friend Jamie Trowell brother of Stephen and Paul Simons who I believe became Organ Scholar of Pembroke College Cambridge the year after or so. We only had sixth form girls in those days we were mostly single sex then. There was certainly strength and depth in there that year. In fact it probably was the best choir we ever had bearing in mind the amount of repertoire we learned in just a half trimester for it which is listed below.
This was the incredible repertoire list just how we learned all that I’ll never know! We never learned like that again! Stephen’s work rate was phenomenal. He knew John Rutter and people and he left us to become Sir Neville Mariners Cellist as a top performer, pure genius.
This was the repertoire list we learned, they must have been nuts but we’d did sing it all. I mean I was Glad AND Blessed be God the Father AND the whole of Let They Hand Be Strengthenéd (all three movements) plus more in one tour! It’s a bloody hard thing to sing at 11 years old but I did that Cantoris part (second treble) all the same in half a term and the rest.
Even Andrew Leach our other conductor with a fantastic reputation, wouldn’t have dared that! Unreal, I was too young to appreciate it and I don’t know how I did it. One venue we sang at in a flint stone church in the middle of nowhere I remember we got three standing ovations and encores with an audience of nine and ranks as the best early experience of making music. You have to remember those pieces meant something to to the French it was just one week after the Berlin wall fell, we were British, and popular! A Non – substitutable experience that. That was my contribution to the euphoria of 1989. I turned 11 on the second day of the tour it was fantastic!
AND Rejoice in the Lamb as WELL? My golly!
We were only a school choir! Boy, the French is a bit dodgy! I would suggest something like this but it’s probably not perfect. I feel something like this would be more intelligible to a Frenchman:
6. Deux Motets
You can’t believe what that meant to them singing these little motets the week the Berlin wall fell in their native country it bought the house down. Such a beautiful little motet I recorded for the BBC World Service years later at Eton.
Cette pieces de la musique sacrée Française, qui sont composé de Maurice Dureflé sont basés dans un mélodie Grégorien. Les examples uniques restent chez un tradition catholique et européenne fort. Ils se donne l’écouteur un impression de quelque chose á picturesque qui se trouve dans les temps anciens peut être.
This was the tour plan:
(b) Trip to Norwich Cathedral 3rd March 1990
The next term we took the pleasure of singing in Norwich Cathedral on an evensong visit there was a lovely mugshot of all the trebles shown in The Ipswichian school magazine that year. There is no record in the parent’s letters of what we sang.
(c) 1st Ipswich School at Snape Maltings Concert on 13th March 1990
This is quite a well known association now between my school Ipswich School and the Benjamin Britten Foundation indeed the school music dept is now known as the Benjamin Britten Faculty of Music. It all goes back to the school having been on some of the original recordings of Britten’s work. In the 1950s my predecessors at Ipswich School had singers on Britten’s original recording of the St Nicolas Cantata with the infamous most celebrated tenor of his era and Britten’s long term partner Peter Pears and conducted by England’s most famous composer of the mid to late 20th century.
The Benjamin Britten Foundation was a musical foundation that was set up as Britten’s musical legacy to our country. He founded a world famous Classical Music Festival in Ipswich’s home county of Suffolk GB, and a concert hall called Snape Maltings. It’s still going today. It’s very famous. In 1990 we had our very first hiring of the concert hall there.
In 1990 our then headmaster John Blatchly had a small concert hall built in our school called the Little School where I did my A Level recital that is acoustically modelled as a miniature version of the main concert hall at Snape as he was an avid musician as well as a doctor of chemistry. I still have my original programme from this flagship concert with profiles of some of our famous teachers in including Stephen Orton whom I believe went from being our head of music to being Sir Neville Mariner’s cellist at The Academy of St Martin in the Fields in London’s Trafalgar Square.
Here are some exerpts form the programme. It was originally supposed to be a one off but it’s now a showcase yearly occurrence Ipswich School at Snape Maltings. I did four of them from 1990-1996.
(d) John Blatchly’s Verdi’s Requiem in the Great School on the 28th April 1990
It is legendary in my school how the headmaster himself prepared us trebles for the school performance of Verdi’s Requiem in the Main School Hall the Great School in 1990. The concert was conducted by the great late Stephen Orton, but John taught our section of trebles on the piano himself. It wasn’t just ISCC (the Chapel choir) but the whole of the 1st and 2nd year boys that he commandeered for it us having been a single sex school back then. The idea was to introduce everyone to the concept of being a chorister. As he was in effect making everyone take the kings schilling for it it produced an unfavourable reaction from some people who preferred the music just to be there for those who liked it.
I’m sticking up for John’s decision to do that as it gave many a positive impression despite the fact that this 1st year choral society was compulsory then. I remember in the 6th form when mentioning this concert that a colleague of mine was particularly proud of his participation in it. I was showing off all the major works I did with Ipswich School in ISCC with the parent’s choir and he said ‘that Verdi’s requiem I did with you don’t forget that!’ So despite it having been seen as a controversial decision to make it compulsory to generate interest. I feel it did do it’s job.
If the English choral tradition had 10 John Blatchly’s selling it to people like that then Concert Choral Music and it’s societies would have the young blood we once were and we would have passed it on to the generation on. As was so often with John’s leadership he came under fire in that way, but he did the right thing. He was original, like me! Verdi’s Requiem 1990 got a lot of people involved and they either liked it or they didn’t.
Later on in the same way he was very firm with me on doing two combined science grades with GCSE art and he made me do three separate science grades Physics, Chemistry and Biology, alongside my arts subjects and that decision became very important to me in later life having that balanced portfolio. It has led to me being a polymath like him and a man of all the talents. I’ve ended up having a career that spans both artistic and scientific pursuits myself having studied science in more depth at that level it’s given me an interest in both despite my arm being twisted into it. I’m a budding computer scientist at 47 as well as a musician and singer. At that age a few tips like that for an experienced headmaster are very useful even if I didn’t like it at the time.
(e) The first evensong at St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds 8th May 1990
This was our first cathedral visit to Bury of four in the 7 years I was in the choir. If we did sing a service it may have been the Malcolm Thomas Attwood Walmisey in D the first British setting of the Canticles with an independent organ part.
2. The William Dore Era 1990-1993
(a) On tour again to the Northern Cathedrals staying in York in 1990
In the autumn of 1990, on my birthday even October 19th. I was on tour with Ipswich School Chapel Choir again this time to the Northern Cathedral City of York. Whilst we were unable to sing in York Minster a contact of choirmaster Dore’s in Durham got us a slot for an evensong there. So it proved a great early privilege to sing an evening service in Durham Cathedral. It’s an amazing one as the oldest part of the cathedral is very early and dates back to the Norman conquest. It has huge, round columns as it’s construction predates that of the Gothic Architectural style. We also got to peak in University College in Durham next door. This is a picture of that evensong.
Staying at the bar convent in York we learned of it containing the preserved hand of a female saint murdered for being a catholic in the reformation by the local nuns. As William was a Roman Catholic we sang at two Catholic Churches in York. These are recorded in the parent’s letter archive we still possess as St Wilfred’s and St Aelred’s Roman Catholic churches in the city and at Beverly Minster before doing an evensong at Lincoln Cathedral with the 3rd longest Gothic Nave in Europe on the way back to East Anglia. We also had a day out at the Crowtree Leisure Centre in Sunderland where they had a split level ice rink I seem to remember.
(b) Ipswich Judges Service on the 1st February 1991
We sang for the Ipswich judiciary on that day at St Mary Le Tower Church in the centre of town And Justice And Judgement a movement form Handel’s Coronation anthem Let The Hand Be Strengthened that we sang on tour in 1989 in Chevreuse.
(c) Ipswich School at Snape Maltings 25th April 1991
It’s listed in my archive that we sang there with full choir but what seems to have gone astray. There is reference to us having had a rehearsal for it with full choir so I must have been involved. I was anyway for the 1st and 2nd year compulsory choir. I remember playing my first ever game of handball there out the back near the marshes with Mr Clare the French teacher. I must have the programme somewhere.
(d) Mozart Requiem performance on the 30 November 1991 in the Great School
Our resident singer and 121 singing teacher Jane Bagnall sang the soprano solo for this performance of the Mozart requiem the second of the major works in operas and oratorios that we performed at school. I remember the adult choir of parents and friends being involved for stiffening also. Some of whom were in the local Bach choir.
(e) 2nd Cathedral Visit to St Edmundsbury Cathedral in Bury St Edmunds 18th February 1992
A second round of evensong at our diocese Cathedral. The repertoire for the performance is unknown. We often sang the William Smith Responses which are more ornate than the others and that I prefer. They contain examples of a rare compositional technique called anacrucial underlay. The responses are for the intercessional prayers in a sung service. The preces are sung in plainchant an ancient monodic solo texture by the cantor and the choir responds in this case in 5 part harmony. It’s part of the traditional Anglican evening service otherwise known as evensong.
My first experience of Recording :
(f) Te Deum Laudamus with Ipswich School Chapel Choir Recording on Bethany Records in 1992
The first of four recordings I’ve done in my life for various Anglican Choirs was for William Dore in 1992 at St Mary Le Tower Church Ipswich where Ed Sheeran was a Chorister. I sang there many times for the Ipswich Judges Service and Ipswich School Carol and Commemoration services from 1989 to 1996. Over and above that it was also where we recorded for the first time, and had audio cassettes published of the Chapel Choir on which I’m a named tenor. It was on this duty that I fell in love for the first time despite it being a one sided crush. Also on this duty was the GSMD-employed and RAM educated harpsichordist Stephen Knight who was then our professional musician in residence. He plays on our recording of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.
This is a small extract of the title piece by Charles Villiers Stanford
The organ playing is good on this one.
(g) Performance of Henry Purcell’s only full true opera Dido and Aeneas May 8th 1993
As Ipswich School had never put on an opera before we decided to perform one that was premiered at a girls school in London namely Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas I sang in the chorus of that performance. Tim Kiddell our Head Chorister and undisputed 3x school singing champion sang solos in Haste Haste to town and other minor parts with Jane and her friends cast in the main roles. This is the sailor’s dance.
Henry Purcell was England finest and most influential composer in history he was a composer of the mid baroque era both of my professional projects in Germany I was later in involved the singing of his music. He was master of the Kings and Queen’s music and had a resident royal choir at St James’s Palace in London.
(h) Performance of Benjamin Britten’s St Nicholas Cantata 27th November 1993
This cantata was as above first associated with Ipswich School in the 1950s on the original recording with Peter Pears and conducted by his partner Sir Benjamin Britten. In tribute to that we performed it again on the 27th November 1993 just before Mr Dore left for his new position at Ampleforth. We might have performed Gabriele Urbain Fauré’s Requiem with it because I remember my own composition was said to sound like it a bit for my GCSE work. We did perform that as well I just don’t know when exactly.
(g) Snape Maltings concert on 18th March 1993
We are recorded as having sung Lobet den Heern Meine Seele by Heinrich Schütz (Praise the Lord, oh my soul). It was at this performance that I joined the audience and heard my first love play 1st desk flute in the orchestra. I had a powerful artistic vision of her floating around my head as a wraith. My father was dying of cancer at the time and died on May 3rd that year. When I got back home to Colchester I wrote my 1st poem of any note about it praying to God that one day I might express the same thing in music. I wrote it in 5 minutes and the next day I’d forgotten to prepare anything for the final of the reading prize and I went through it 2x read it and won with a unanimous verdict my first speech day prize The Rowley Elliston Prize for Fourth Form Reading it won my assisted place for me and allowed me to stay on at the school when he died my mother was an unemployed single mum. I collected it just days after dad died on speech day in May 1993. I was 15. The poem has now been named as The Crystal Bed but it was originally untitled. She’s not my true love now but she was at first. She was just a crush but it was mind blowingly important to me when dad died to have inspiration and strength to keep going with my GCSEs. I came up with that psychological mechanism to survive.
3. (a) ISCC in 1994
During this time the music dept at Ipswich School was going through a period of transition and we had a good solid choir directed sometimes by Andrew Wilson and sometimes by Stephen Knight.
Andrew Wilson was a really talented young music teacher and choirmaster but he was only in his first post after university. He was given an enormous amount of responsibility for his position and in my opinion he was afraid of the reaction of those above him. He held the fort with us, did our bread and butter services, commemoration services and carols but we didn’t go on tour again in this time. I felt he did the right thing with it. It’s a shame because potentially I thought he was an excellent and even the best choirmaster in 10 years time. He showed real talent in teaching us football as well.
What I appreciate about him most is going to Edinburgh University, and feeling at a disadvantage having not gone to a conservatoire or to Oxbridge despite the fact that in many respects he was more highly qualified on piano. He had a fellowship diploma from Trinity College London, with age I know just how hard that is to achieve being a choirmaster on your own. Very underrated and I wanna stick up for him now I’m older. I feel like him with age. I really respect the letters FTCL now. Anyone who can play the Waldstein Sonata by Beethoven for a qualification as that is on the repertoire list for it I do respect. It’s a very hard thing to play that.
(b) Evensong At St Edmundsbury Cathedral on the 25th January 1994
Andrew did take us to St Edmundsbury or Bury St Edmunds Cathedral for an evensong visit that we all enjoyed. It was our third visit to the native cathedral in the diocese of Ipswich and St Edmundsbury. According to my performance log we sang the Smith Responses and possibly This Joyful Eastertide which is a Easter Carol arranged by the founder of the BBC Proms Charles Wood as the anthem.
4. The baton passes to Andrew Leach 1994-1996
Andrew Leach was our second really highly-rated choirmaster and talent.
Andrew’s early career had something in common with mine. He was selected for a specialist music school for kids the Yahoudi Mehnuin School as a boy where such prestigious classical musicians as Nicola Benedetti and Nigel Kennedy were educated. Unfortunately, his parents said that it wasn’t a broad enough education for him and didn’t let him go. It’s rather similar to what happened to me with my parents not wanting me to go to Kings Ely Cathedral School for singing. I didn’t actually audition but James Smith suggested it to my mother as an option. That’s why I was sympathetic towards him in that regard. He was very brave with that.
Andrew had an affection for 20th Century Classical Music as well as jazz, the types of music other teachers and choirmaster daren’t touch. It is him I owe my open musical heart to in the sense that I love almost any form of music that’s going. I fell Tippett in particular. I’m a massive Sir Michael Tippett fan even now and I lament at some of his piano sonatas only getting 1700 hits on U-Tube these days. We performed the 5 spirituals form A Child of Our Time his oratorio for WWII. This is my favourite the final number in the whole work. It’s called deep river. The negro spirituals replaced the lutheran chorales in the oratorio which was composed in the Westerham area of Kent in 1944. Tippett was a pacifist and jailed for not wanting to go to war. I was very sympathetic to his views as a teenager having lost my father to cancer at 15 years of age.
(a) Concert with 5 Spirituals from A Child of Our Time from Sir Michael Tippett 1st December 1994
(b) Performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms 1st December 1994.
It was a wonderful introduction to top 20th Century Music to get down and involved with performing Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein which I feel is an absolutely iconic piece of 20th Century music I feel really will still be around in 100 years time being performed. I performed it in Hebrew when I was 16.5 in the Lower sixth as part of his first A Level group with ISCC. Here’s the beautifully lyrical start to the second movement Adonai with Leonard Bernstein conducting. It’s just a great all round piece of music that’s not too far removed from tonality but it does have the excitement and bite and rhythm of good 20th century pieces as well as wonderfully lyrical sections it uses the full pallet of musical colours without going too far really.
(c) Josef Haydn’s Mass in Time of War (Paukenmesse) at Snape Maltings 16th January 1995
We enjoyed performing one last time at Snape in 2005 at school with Andrew in command of a performance of Josef Haydn’s Paukenmesse or Mass in Time of War. It was written at the time Vienna was invaded during the Napoleonic wars. It’s somewhat less well known that his other famous oratorio he wrote at the end of his life in London just before he died The Creation.
Haydn was employed for most of his life by count Esztherhazy in Eastern Austria near the Hungarian boarder some distance away from Vienna by European standards. He was a friend of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the second most prominent exponent of the Classical Style of Classical Music in existence from about (1720 – 1830). I think he’s highly underrated and I’m particularly impressed by his prolific output of piano sonatas but he’s also the most prolific composer of all time of Symphonies he wrote 106 of them. Mainly this was due to his courtly duties educating the count’s children and friends and entertaining with his private orchestra.
(d) Messiah Highlights with me as a Countertenor Soloist 24th May 1995
Having won the school singing competition in 1995 I was given the solos for the school performance of the Messiah Highlights by Handel with the school orchestra. I sang 2 postgraduate level arias for Countertenor to represent the school as a headliner which was a great honour. These were Oh Thou that Tellest and But Who May Abide the third solo He was Despised was taken over by Nicola Carnaby as she was then. But who may abide is on the PG diploma repertoire list for the Trinity College exams. I sang it at school with 17 and the successfully used it 2x as a Conservatoire audition piece at GSMD London when I was 19 in 1997 and at Cologne Conservatoire Wuppertal Campus in 2002. I could sing it from memory without the score immaculately then.
(e) Performance of Sir Edward Elgar’s Part songs ‘To the Bavarian Highlands’ 23rd November 1995
This was with the school orchestra.
This was a performance of these songs. Elgar’s part songs and anthems are his finest works to me. The detail in the highly annotated scores is a wonder to behold and begins to create a whole new sound world that leads towards 20th Century Music despite being firmly and fervently Romantic in nature.
He was invited to Bavaria on holiday and wrote this work in praise of it’s landscape and people. This is the final movement of the work.
(f) Evensong at Bury St Edmunds (St Edmunsbury) Cathedral on the 25th January 1995
Shortly before I won the singing cup we had our final evensong in Bury St Edmunds of the four visit there. We are recorded as having sung Thou Wilt Keep Him in Perfect Peace which is one of the two great anthems by Samuel Sebastian Wesley our anser to Brahms who wrote two cracking anthems that constitute the greatest anthem repertoire of the 19th century outside Sir Edward Elgar. Brahms met him and loved them and wrote his own compositional response. Unfortunately he fell sick and died very young or he would have rescued us from being what the Germans called the Land without Music almost signal handedly I feel.
We also sang the famous Charles Villiers Stanford setting of the Canticles in Bb as far as I can recall. Stanford was British then but he was actually an Irishman as you would refer to him now. He very nearly made it as a champion composer but lost in his composition competition final to the French composer Claude Debussy and he came second. He is a chief exponent of the 19th Century British Choral Style like Hubert Parry the founding principle of the Royal College of Music in London and I believe an old boy of my school as well as his great grandson Ben Parry of the Swingle Singers. Here is a lovely nippy performance of it. The magnificat is the song of the Blessed Virgin Mary proclaiming Christ as she has been impregnated by the holy spirit otherwise known as the Blessed Virgin’s expostulation.
This is what I call a masculine hunky nuncy! The Nunc Dimittis is the Song of Simion who was told that he would meet christ before he died, met him held him as a baby in his arms and then died.
(g) Evensong at the wonderful Ely Cathedral on the 29th March 1996
We travelled from Ipswich to the famous cathedral with the octagonal tower at Ely in the fens. Not far from Cambridge to sing evensong there. I believe we sang the other Wesley anthem Blessed by God the Father. I think it’s a great one too you can listen to it here. We first sang it in the choir in my era on our tour to Chevreuse near Paris 6.5 years earlier in 1989 with Stephen Orton. It’s a real privilege to sing in there because it’s a cracking building and atmosphere.