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‘I want Scotland to take pride in Festival Chorus’ New chorus master Aidan Oliver shares his vision
THIS weekend Radio 3 has decided that St Valentine is outshone by French composer Hector Berlioz, with the BBC’s orchestras and choirs contributing to a celebration of “Berlioz –
The Ultimate Romantic”, ahead of the 150th anniversary of his death at the start of March.
Scotland has a concert at Glasgow City Halls tomorrow afternoon, broadcast live. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is conducted by the composer’s countryman Pascal Rophe in an event that boasts plenty of kilt as well the jaunty beret. The opening Waverley Overture, inspired by the writing of Sir Walter Scott, is followed by Scotland’s international mezzo-soprano opera star Karen Cargill singing the solo cantata La mort de Cleopatre. The programme culminates in Lelio, the composer’s sequel to the Symphonie Fantastique, with many more Scots voices, in the form of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus.
The Festival Chorus has an established relationship with the SSO, which, unlike both the RSNO and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, has no chorus of its own, but tomorrow’s concert represents the debut of the singers prepared for their performance by their new chorus master Aidan Oliver.
Oliver succeeds musical dynamo, and founder of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, Christopher Bell, now to be found plying his choral-honing skills on the other side of the Atlantic with choruses in Washington and Chicago. It is fair to say that finding someone to follow the charismatic and ebullient Bell looked a tricky task, but the Edinburgh International Festival appointed a man with a huge range of experience for his years – and a musician who had found his own easy rapport with the choir very quickly indeed. Sitting in on one of the regular Tuesday evening rehearsals at The Hub, the EIF’s home below Edinburgh Castle, I heard Oliver dispense erudite insight into James MacMillan’s Quickening – one of four diverse works the chorus will be singing in August – before guiding the different sections of the chorus through some of the most difficult parts of very demanding music.
“This coming Festival there are four major and very varied works after the Berlioz Lelio with the BBC SSO. As well as James MacMillan’s amazing Quickening, there’s Elgar’s The Kingdon and Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony – all substantial works with very different demands and challenges for a chorus,” he told me, clearly relishing the task before himself and the singers. It is one unlike that faced by any other choir, he goes explains.
“Not only do they perform four or five demanding works in an incredibly intensive period, but they do that with a different orchestra and a different conductor every time. It is not like the BBC Symphony Chorus at the Proms, who are married to the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
“It is a very different dynamic and that is both a challenge for the chorus but also one of its very great attractions for its members. They get that buzz of constantly stepping up to the plate for a new conductor that has possibly never heard them, never mind worked with them before.”
As he tells it, Oliver fell into a musical career after starting out on a path that seemed more likely to keep him in academia.
“I was a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, the Catholic Cathedral in London, then a music scholar at Eton and a choral scholar at King’s College Cambridge, but for a while I wasn’t sure that I was going to go into the music profession as I had quite a strong academic background. I was at Harvard for a year and King’s College London for a year studying classics and then moved more into musicology. But I eventually ended up training as a repetiteur at the National Opera Studio, not necessarily to become a repetiteur but to inform my conducting and general musicianship and involvement in opera.”
In his portfolio music career, Oliver is also director of music at St Margaret’s, Westminster and of the Dulwich Choral Society as well as the originator of Philharmonia Voices, an ad hoc professional choir associated with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra.
“I collaborated a lot with conductor Richard Hickox in my early career and he invited me as a very, very green aspiring conductor and choral director to go and work with him at the Spoleto Festival in Italy and assist him on opera recording projects with Chandos. I have worked quite a lot at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden and been guest chorus master at ENO for a few productions.
“A big highlight was being chorus master for a Proms performance of Britten’s Peter Grimes with ENO and Ed Gardner. One of the earliest things I did with the Philharmonia Orchestra was a semi-staged production of Vaughan Williams’ Pilgrim’s Progress in Sadler’s Wells with Hickox and a wonderful cast of English singers.”
It is not hard to see Oliver being of wider value to the Festival, given his vast experience of concert performances of operas, which have become such an important ingredient of the programme in recent years, but his
I’d love to link the chorus more closely to the musical community in Edinburgh
focus is on the chorus, with a commute to work each week he says is much easier than it might appear.
“Edinburgh is such a beautiful and inspiring city to be in. I love London and I am a Londoner at heart, but there is something very different about arriving on Princes Street in the tram and seeing the castle and walking the cobbled hill. I live very near London City airport so I get the Docklands Light Railway and hop on a plane. Come the summer, of course, I’ll be a resident for the run-up and during the Festival period.”
If any citizens of Edinburgh were concerned about the first non-resident Festival chorus master, the truth of the matter is perhaps even worse.
“My mother grew up in Glasgow and Islay and I still have relatives on that side of Scotland, particularly in Glasgow. But I didn’t know Edinburgh and hadn’t been to the Festival before last year. She lived in Glasgow but had grandparents on Islay and spent summer holidays there until at the age of 12 the whole family moved to a farm near Bowmore, before coming back to Glasgow for the rest of her high school years. She did a lot of Gaelic singing. Her family were schoolteachers and her uncle ran the school choir on Islay, who competed in and won at the Mod.”
That education gene clearly runs alongside the musical one in Oliver’s DNA. “One of the first things I said to the chorus after I’d been appointed was that I wanted to make sure that the rehearsal process was not just a means to an end but rewarding in itself, with every rehearsal something that enhances their experience. It is not just about those concerts in August but also that a wet Tuesday in February is still about developing as people and as musicians.
“We spent a weekend immersed in Elgar’s The Kingdom and it was really rewarding to me to learn about a piece I wasn’t particularly familiar with and then pass that on to the chorus. By the end of the rehearsal process they should know not just their own music but the whole piece. And that’s not often the case when you are just focused on the next concert. We can explore the music between what they sing as well as some of the historical and musicological background.”
And that breadth of interest applies to how the singers relate to the wider world as well.
“I see the chorus as having an important role in the community as the only performing arm of the Festival itself. We have people going back out into the community and spreading the word about the music. I think that is a role that could be developed and I’d love to link the chorus even more closely into the general musical community in Edinburgh, and outside of the Festival.
“Their lifestyle means that younger people do find it difficult to commit for such an intensive period during the Festival but we try to make membership of the chorus flexible, so that we’ll have full chorus members and what we call ‘augmenters’ who will do only a select number of the projects. We also have a contingent in Glasgow who prepare one of the pieces in Glasgow with me, and then we put it all together nearer the Festival time.
“I want to see Scotland take pride in the chorus and feel they have a stake in it. I’d love to make it more possible for people with families, or living out of town, or with busy careers, to be a part of it.”
Edinburgh Festival Chorus sings Belioz’s Lelio with the BBC SSO tomorrow in Glasgow City Halls at 3pm