Sheen Gate Choir Experience Sept23 to June 24
(Compiled by Simon Renton, a bass in the Choir, with contributions from other members of the Choir.)
“He enabled us to sing in a way that we never thought we could”.
This comment, made by of one of the altos in the choir, sums up how we in the Choir felt after singing the Mozart Requiem in June 2024, a performance conducted by the Choir’s Music Director – Ben Thapa (1982 – 2024). The Requiem formed the second part of the concert. In the first part the Choir and soloists had sung some operatic excerpts from Mozart operas; after that, there was a performance of Mozart’s final piano concerto, No 27 in B flat major. The soloists were Robert Bridge (piano), Claire Filer (soprano), Emma Jüngling (mezzo soprano), Graham Neal (tenor) and Peter Norris (bass). The Richmond Orchestra was led by Martin Smith, who also conducted the Mozart piano concerto.
None of us were to know that this was the last time that Ben would conduct the Choir in a performance. It was his ‘final’ concert with us. The Mozart piano concerto was Mozart’s ‘final’ piano concerto; he performed it in person at its premiere. The Requiem was Mozart’s ‘final’ work. The last piece in the Requiem which Mozart had the strength to write was the ‘Lachrymosa’. He died before completing it. ‘’Lachrymosa” – ‘weeping’.
Yet, despite his untimely and premature death, there is nothing ‘final’ about Ben’s legacy. “He enabled us to sing in a way that we never thought we could”. And we all know that we can go on singing in that way, using ‘Ben’s Way’ as a firm foundation. We can say to him – “wherever you might be, just wait to hear us in the Brahms Requiem!”
“Ben’s Way”. What was this Way? It is important that we don’t forget.
I suspect that Ben had in his mind the sound that he believed that the Choir could create. It was his task to show the Choir how we too could share that imagined sound. Ben had three particular assets. First, he was in his own right a brilliant singer. The voice was his instrument. He had learnt through years of study and practice how to develop and use the voice – his instrument. Second, he was a fine musician. Third, he was a born communicator. He knew how to communicate his insight and skills to choirs, most of whose members had enjoyed no formal training in singing.
Part of his communication skills lay in coming out with memorable phrases. As one of the sopranos remembers a propos of Handel’s Messiah piece ‘And the glory of the Lord’, Ben said: “Less barnyard, more Bath Assembly Rooms please”; and, a propos of the Christe Eleison in Mozart’s Requiem he commented: “You’re thinking but I’m singing fiction!”
It was because we all knew that Ben was such a charismatic music director and had confidence in him that the Choir embarked on its first Come & Sing day on 9 March 2024. We knew that Ben and ‘Ben’s Way’ was a real selling point. We could tell newcomers and would-be joiners that it would be a transformative day. The ethos behind the day was set out in the publicity material, which included some paragraphs written by Ben.
“Singing is about more than just notes and noise. It is a uniquely human offering, and marries up brain, intention and communication in a way that is almost incomparable.
So many singers, amateur and professional, find themselves so bound up with the learning notes, that we forget to imbue them with the processes of healthy singing from the first instance, resulting in the creation of counterproductive habits that can become hard to eradicate further down the line.”
Thanks to Robert Bridge’s nudging, at the Come & Sing day, Ben provided a glorious and moving example of his art. He sang Reynaldo Hahn’s A Chloris (video here). Ben is the sound and the French text is laid upon this carpet of sound. Robert mentioned that Ben was reluctant to divert the attention of the participants in the choral ‘workshop’ to a ‘performance’ by him of a song. He was not there to be a ‘performer’. So, he sang to us in order to demonstrate how the text and the music combined and how the French text should be shaped by the singer. And then we proceeded to sing Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine, a perennial favourite of the Choir.
Words and the text were so important to Ben. He would instruct us on how to avoid unwanted elisions which produced combinations unknown to the English (or Latin, French or German) language: for example, ‘Gloria In excelsis Deo’ not ‘GloriaRin excelsis Deo’.
That Come & Sing day was a new venture for the Choir. Ben encouraged the Choir to attempt other new ventures. Thanks to his networking skills he introduced the Choir to new singers and professional and amateur music groups. He opened doors to the prospect of new collaborations. He pointed the way to undertaking choral pieces that were challenging.
In embarking on these new ventures, the Choir also had the invaluable contribution and support of Robert Bridge, both as a pianist and a musician, a true professional. He was a steadying and dependable presence. It was fitting that in Ben’s 2024 summer concert with the Choir, Ben enthusiastically supported the idea that Robert should perform a Mozart piano concerto.
Ben’s way of starting rehearsals was to use the ‘warm-up’ instructively and imaginatively. It was never just a matter of warming up the voice. It was like crossing the threshold of the World of Song. It was as though we were stepping onto the operatic stage and singing out to an auditorium. The auditorium might be empty while we were rehearsing, but come the final rehearsals and the performance itself, there would be an audience. Ben brought that sense of the operatic stage into everything he taught us. Choirs and choruses are, for the most part, central to the operatic experience.
Ben would often start a rehearsal with a request to sing ‘Oy’. And then, after the first ‘Oy’ he would show us how to use our instruments – our voices – to invest the ‘Oy’ with a fullness of tone which sent the sound – a full-throated sound – soaring to the very back of the Church and out through the Rose window and beyond. An ‘Oy’ which resounded until it died away far in the distance. He showed us not only how to produce a full sound but how to maintain it with continuing energy – so that the ‘sound’ remained vibrant and alive.
‘Prepare to sing – use the four beats before you come in to think what you are about to sing and then breathe in slowly. Don’t wait until the last minute.’ That would be like waiting for the doors of a train to start closing at the station and then jumping aboard at the last minute – all in a sweat and lather and breathless.
As regards that ‘Oy’, there resonates In my mind Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings and the lines from the Tennyson poem: ‘Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Bugle blow; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.’ But beyond earshot and in imagination the sound of the instrument or the voice continues. As Schubert/Müller put it:
“The further my voice carries, the clearer it echoes back to me”.
[The Shepherd on the Rock – Franz Schubert / Wilhelm Müller (1828)]
Ben taught us to think of the singer as if he/she was an instrument. We had both to use the whole body to produce ‘sound’ and, at the same time, avoid restricting the production and flow of the sound. A constricted throat or raised or tense shoulders would restrict the sound.
The source of the sound came from the body’s core. The foundation was the diaphragm. The diaphragm enabled expansion. ‘Think expansion – enlarging sideways what is already there’. The throat should serve as a mere conduit of the sound, free of restriction. A constricted throat resulted in a constricted sound. One needed to feel ‘Open’ – that would enable the sound to emerge – and to emerge with “energy”. And “bright eyes” contributed to that “energy” and the quality of the sound.
One could then lay the words on that rich carpet of sound. Ben would stand full upright and then, with a slow movement, as if playing at bowls, launch his ‘virtual’ bowl with a smooth extension of his arm. Using a different metaphor, he would say: “Roll out the carpet to its full length – a carpet made of chocolate – the unrolling of a stream of chocolate”.
Alluding to Ben’s treasury of metaphors to illustrate vocal excellence, one of my fellow basses remembers Ben’s love of cricket. There were occasions when Ben would lean into the flight of an imaginary cricket ball and with a flowing swing of an imagined bat cream the ball through the covers to the boundary.
We needed to luxuriate in the production of the sound, its quality and duration.
As mentioned, restricting the sound could result from physical impediments. The sound could also be adversely affected by ‘mind games’. Ben tackled a number of these mental impediments in rehearsals. There was the ‘fear of making a mistake – the fear of being wrong’. That fear could result in a singer waiting for others to sing. That led to tentative singing and unliberated sound. As Ben said – “I need you to sing out I need to hear the notes. I can always put the notes right. But to do that, I need to hear the singing.” There were many occasions when he reassured us by saying: “A wrong note is better than no note”.
Burying one’s head in the score also restricted the sound. And equally importantly, it restricted communication between conductor and singer. ‘Look up!’ was a frequent cry. “I need to see your faces and hear your voices”.
“If you are looking up and I get it wrong, that’s on me.” (There was always room for improvement – even if one was looking up! He once said during a rehearsal of the Mozart Requiem, after the final ‘Amen’: “Simon was looking up and watching me, but he still got it wrong!” I thought (a trifle indignantly at the time) that Ben had actually misheard at that moment. Maybe he did; maybe he didn’t. We will never know. I can still laugh about that incident!)
Forgetting to bring one’s own music or a pencil met with (not always restrained) disapproval. How could one possibly sing out and watch the conductor if one was sharing a score with a fellow singer!
Another of Ben’s pithy exhortations lingers in the memory of another of the sopranos: “just open your gob and sing!”. As she recollects:
“He had an amazing and extensive fund of imagery, amusing as well as serious, to make us aware of the whole physical and mental equipment we needed to draw on in order to produce our best voice.”
In this way, the Choir learnt to sing more confidently – to believe in itself. And we all knew that too. After each rehearsal, we felt exhilarated, as well as challenged too! We felt that we were making progress as a choir. And, speaking for myself, I found that as time went on the upper register of my voice became more open, less restricted; and with that came an ability to ‘sing out’ in the upper reaches of my voice and still produce (I hoped) a sonorous sound.
As part of the ‘transformational’ project that we experienced, Ben focused on ensuring that the Choir really knew the music. When learning the Mozart Requiem, we repeated sections of it many times. He was teaching us to internalise the music – to get inside it – to own it. We were jointly practising the music. We would spread out round Christchurch, making sure we were not standing next to singers in our section, and sing. That was a testing experience. Yet it meant that when in the concert each voice section stood ‘in columns’ and not ‘line abreast’, the choir produced more confident ‘blocks’ of sound which melded together.
In a BBC Radio 3 programme on Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony the pianist and musical polymath David Owen Norris asked the rhetorical question – “when it comes to performing a choral piece, who is it for?” He then answered himself – “Of course, it is for the audience and the composer (and conductor); but importantly, it is for the choir.” It is the singers who learn the piece, who enter into a dialogue with the composer; who, as it were think the composer’s thoughts – who enter his imaginative achievements.
During the spring and early summer of 2024, we all immersed ourselves in the Mozart Requiem. Incrementally, we came to own the music of the Requiem. Maybe we didn’t actually dream it when we slept; but I for one was not far off from doing that.
So, when it came to the day of the performance, buttressed by wonderful soloists and orchestra and conducted by Ben, we found that were able to sing the Requiem in a way that none of us believed we were capable of doing so. And it showed. The orchestra and soloists heard it, as did the audience.
As I have mentioned earlier, Ben brought to the Choir his experience from the stage. We became a chorus performing on the stage. It was as though we were in the theatre. And, as I wrote in the programme note for the concert, the Mozart Requiem was conceived by a composer who revelled in the theatre and the operatic world:
“Mozart’s Requiem is a work of extraordinary Humanity which straddles the theatre and the church. The Secular and the Sacred are fused. The chorus and the soloists are the characters; the orchestra provides the stage. The gamut of human experience – joy, sorrow, exhilaration, hope, fear, despair and triumph – is experienced. We, the audience, the musicians, the soloists and chorus emerge with lives enriched by the creative genius of Mozart.“
Ben challenged us to be better – to sing ‘beyond ourselves’. In less than nine months, he brought the Choir to a new pitch of excellence, to a new level, to a new experience – an at times quasi-operatic experience.
The Mozart Requiem has its reflective and sombre moments. But unlike many Requiems, it does not end in quiet submission. The vigorous and uplifting fugue of the Kyrie eleison at the beginning of the work re-enters in the final pages of the Requiem, replete with new words. Mozart’s great fugue carries the choir and the conductor and orchestra forwards to the final bars of the music. The music is gloriously affirmative. It overflows with vitality and “Life”. A final Amen crowns the end of the great fugue. It is a triumphant moment. “Every performance of the Requiem is special. It is a celebration of Humanity and the Creative Spirit.”
Now, for our own sake and as a tribute to what Ben taught us, it is down to us all to continue the journey – the journey of making music in whatever way we can – and to hear and enjoy the Creative Spirit. Let us remember Ben’s Way and think:
“The further our voices carry, the clearer they echo back to us”. (Schubert/Müller)