“DO THE sopranos think the tenors are just a tiny bit flat on the last note?” asks Sir David Willcocks with a twinkle in his 83-year-old eye.
My mother and I are on a cruise of the Baltic with a Concerts from Scratch choir. The choir met for the first time as we sailed out of Dover aboard the Greek cruiser Triton, and 2,800 nautical miles later we have bonded into a harmonious unit, able to sing the most complicated of Renaissance madrigals. There are no auditions — an enjoyment of singing and an ability to read music are all that is required. Most of the 145 singers belong to their local choirs and a few are conductors; several people bring non-singing partners. Everybody soon makes friends and connections.
My 88-year-old mother Verily, who sings tenor with the Sheringham and Cromer Choral Society, isn’t the oldest on board. Affra Leckie, 90, an alto with the Mid-Sussex Choir for 42 years, had been on Scratch choir cruises to the Norwegian fjords and the eastern Mediterranean. “You meet so many wonderful and interesting people,” she says.
We have been instructed to bring our own copies of The Oxford Book of English Madrigals and The New Oxford Easy Anthem Book. Looking at them on the train to Dover I had thought: “These look difficult and rather dull.” I could not have been more wrong.
With so many singers, we are divided randomly into two choirs. The balance of sopranos, altos and basses is good, but there are not enough tenors, so they are allowed to sing in both choirs. Nobody seems to mind if other voices opt for more singing, too. The timetable of daily choral sessions, lasting more than an hour each, is fitted in between on-shore excursions. When we are at sea all day there are sessions in the morning and afternoon.
Sir David accompanies us on an electronic piano with one hand while conducting with the other. We begin with a quick run-through of each anthem or madrigal. I have forgotten how much concentration is required for the words, notes (up? down? long? short? dotted? loud? soft?) and keeping in time with the other singers, both in one’s own part and the other three parts. No wonder the ancients among us have such sprightly minds.
Then we sing each part separately, with detailed instructions. “Bar three, that second minim, altos, give yourself time to take a really big breath for the next long note. I don’t want any breathing until the end of that line.” Once Sir David is confident in our ability to hold each line, he lets go of the piano.
“Sometimes I put a hanky on my head to see how long it is before singers notice — it is remarkable how rarely they remember to look at the conductor,” he says. Nobody is dismissed from his Scratch choirs, so I ask him what happens if someone really cannot sing. “That’s simple. If it is, say, a soprano, I say that their voice is so good that the tenors need their help; you can’t hear a soprano trying to sing among tenors. Or I might move a good tenor to the middle of the altos to improve them all.” I am amazed at what a good conductor can do to tighten up a motley bunch of singers and bring the anthems and madrigals alive.
Choral sessions are punctuated with anecdotes from Sir David’s varied musical career, which began with a wireless broadcast with Walford Davies in 1925. He has been conducting Scratch choirs since he retired as director of the Royal College of Music 18 years ago, and gives three or four concerts a year in the Albert Hall, Venice or Vienna. His enthusiasm and energy instil excitement and musicality into every voice, whatever its talent. I have not sung since school and my sight-reading is decidedly rusty, so I settle myself next to Benedict Hastings, 13, an experienced treble from Bath Abbey, and each day I feel my singing improve.
We begin with simple anthems, the whole choir uniting to sing each part before moving on to blend the voices. We can’t be singing too badly because, during calm seas, Captain Niko Koufogiannis appears at the back to listen. Other passengers often come to listen, too, but we aren’t really practising for an occasion; we are all singing because we want to. There is no register and nobody minds if you sleep in.
As we plough through the Kiel Canal towards the Baltic Sea, the volume and excitement of the five-part madrigal Fyer, fyer! O help! I burn me! is such that I expect the chief fire officer to arrive. When the ship’s horn blasts a warning at a sailing boat, Sir David improvises a witty sea shanty around its note.
Sir David accommodates all nationalities: “That minim in the tenors should be a dotted crotchet — or, for the Americans, a half note.” The Americans in question are the octogenarian Ace Agry, a widower from Connecticut who sings bass, and his tenor son Brad, 49, from New York.
Between Gdansk and St Petersburg a Force 8 gale blows up. Suppers are abandoned, the decks declared out of bounds and everyone lies groaning in their beds. The next morning the ship is again stable enough for more singing. We cheer ourselves up with Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, which Sir David tells us that he has composed for an American choir but has never heard live before. “Sounds quite good, doesn’t it?” he adds impishly.
On our arrival in St Petersburg, we are treated to an afternoon of art in the Hermitage followed by Swan Lake at the Imperial Theatre. Performed with the original 1885 choreography by gorgeous men in bulging tights, and featuring flocks of cygnets in feathered snoods, it is pure Degas.
From there, we turn back westwards. In most of the ports that we visit, the ship docks in the city centre. From the deck of the Triton we can see Helsinki’s flower market, the Stockholm funfair, and Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid. We are given guided tours of cathedrals, palaces and Old Towns, but I have to confess that Scandinavia is now a blur of cleanliness and confusing history.
Being at sea is best. On deck early one morning I find the crew polishing the brass handrails as we slide towards Stockholm through thousands of tiny islands with the sun rising behind us. Magic.
After Copenhagen, we are in the Skagerak Channel singing the lovely anthem Drop, Drop Slow Tears, by Shakespeare’s contemporary Orlando Gibbons, when Elsinore Castle appears on our port side, surrounded by a spinney of huge wind generators, catching the north wind whistling over Denmark.
On the last night the Scratch choir lines up on the dance floor for its spot in the International Talent Show. Between a German jazz pianist and an American comedian, we sing Thomas Morley’s Now is the Month of Maying with syncopated fa-la-las in five parts. Then Sir David, on a navy-blue Steinway, accompanies Adam Ridley, normally to be heard in the London Bach Choir, singing Bring a Little Happiness. I contribute Stately as a Galleon by Joyce Grenfell. The translator kindly explains to the mystified Dutch, German and Belgian audience that a galleon was an early English cruise liner.
Janie Hampton’s biography, Joyce Grenfell, is published by John Murray, £9.99
The Really Big Chorus: www.trbc.co.uk
