Music
Singularly silent
Peter Phillips
MAmsterdam y peregrinations around Europe as self-styled ambassador of Renaissance music in general and English choral singing in particular have brought me at last to the unbelievably damp city of Amsterdam. My task here is to conduct the Nederlands Kamerkoor (Netherlands Chamber Choir), a professional group of some 20 members, who to all outward appearances resemble many other chamber choirs, not least some of those that I have recently been describ- ing in this column. In common with these others, they are not known in England, because, as I have already explained, England is stuffed full of choirs and chor- uses to repletion, so that any concert promoter has the luxury of choosing from a gamut of groups which will sing him almost anything at almost any price. The largest ones are usually the freest, while the smaller ones are the most expensive on a diminishing scale, with one-voice-to-a-part groups of four or five members costing the most. Only the BBC singers are both large and expensive, and their employment is secure. At any rate foreign groups do not stand much of a chance, since they expect to be flown everywhere, put up in hotels and given a daily subsistence allowance, in addition to a decent fee, which is common practice everywhere else but brings howls of complaint in Britain.
The interesting thing about the Neder- lands Kamerkoor is that the authorities treat it like a symphony orchestra. This, in a way, is the realisation of a dream of mine. Here is a government (in this day and age and so on) paying a subsidy which maintains on good salaries a group of singers who are not in the least attached either to opera or to the symphonic reper- toire. They are required, as state- sponsored orchestras are required, to work to the highest standards in choral singing at the taxpayer's expense. This, of course, is unheard of in England, though I notice that with us, as elsewhere, the govern- ment is prepared to underwrite in- strumental groups, but not vocal ones. Essentially there is no reason why this bias should operate, since singers are just as professional as orchestral players and have quite as large a repertoire to present to the Public. The explanation must rest in tradi- tion: that choirs have long been large and free, amateur adjuncts to orchestras, that have always been professional. I commend the Dutch for seeing that this should not be the whole story, and as time goes by, if I have anything to do with it, it will be less and less of the story. Unfortunately the system is not working very well at the moment. I have never Come across a group of singers, or indeed instrumentalists, who are quite so reliably ill as the members of this group, or so able to talk about the fact that they are voice- less. I wonder if they would be off work quite so often if they were not safely on salaries with endless small-print clauses which say they cannot be sacked. Their English counterparts, who are paid by the engagement, work much longer hours and have to be literally certifiable before they fail to turn up. I know it is possible to play the violin with a heavy cold, probably even when in a terminally depressed state, and that it is much more difficult to sing under these conditions, but state-run orchestras must function better than this or the whole system would have been scrapped years ago.
I hope the present epidemic will soon pass, because the Nederlands Kamkerkoor is entering its 50th anniversary year, or rather years. Happily no one can quite decide whether the choir was founded in 1937 or 1939, so the celebrations will start now and carry on well into 1990, for good measure. The plan is to do all the choral music of Jan Sweelinck in 15 projects with many different conductors, of which mine is the first. As they go along they will record all the Sweelinck items, which is a noble scheme. Sweelinck (1562-1621) was certainly a composer to be proud of, a man of wide-ranging achievements in music, friends with many of his leading contem- poraries, teacher of many musicians who subsequently distinguished themselves, and genuinely Dutch (a native of Amster- dam) not Flemish. These 15 projects will successively set him in the context of other composers, who, because of the epoch in question may be either Baroque or Re- naissance. Sweelinck's own music may often be interpreted either in a Baroque or a Renaissance manner, which adds extra spice to the whole enterprise. Some of the other conductors, like Harnoncourt, Leonhardt and Koopman will no doubt go for an out-and-out Baroque view. I incline to the Renaissance one, with the reserva- tion that Sweelinck should not be made to sound like Palestrina. The composer with whom it semed to be most appropriate to pair Sweelinck on this occasion — indeed a close friend of his — was Peter Philips. They make a very satisfying duo.
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