The Lying Down Concert: Earthrise, Royal Opera House

Lying down and looking up makes an entirely different music experience

We should lie down to listen to music much more often. Gravity pulls away the thought and frown lines, smoothes the intellectual tracks and folds on the face, while you feel the blood in your head pumping lushly to dreamier parts of your brain. Joanna MacGregor’s If-A-Tree festival at the Royal Opera House this weekend may well be hitting some fey bases along its way, but Earthrise: The Lying Down Concert - was a spectacularly enjoyable opening event.

BBC Symphony Chorus, Stephen Jackson, Royal Albert Hall

A weighty programme of choral music topples over under the strain

Every year there are a couple of Proms that have a haphazard look about them, as if a fire had suddenly broken out in the BBC archives, and the programming committee grabbed whatever came to hand – a piano quartet, a couple of choral odes and a concerto for mandolin – and made for freedom. Though there had evidently once been a clear architecture to Sunday’s concert by the BBC Symphony Chorus and friends, in practice things were somewhat confused; endless personnel shiftings and a stuffed-to-bursting programme blunted the impact of music which demanded altogether simpler treatment.

The Kingdom, Three Choirs Festival

World-class singers and orchestra make most of Elgar's flawed oratorio

The Three Choirs Festival is with us again, for the 283rd year – almost as many, it seems, as The Mousetrap: this year we are in Gloucester. Nowadays, though, this great festival is no longer imprisoned, Barchester-like, in the cathedral close, but ranges all over Gloucester city and Gloucestershire, with concerts also in Tewkesbury, Cheltenham, Highnam and Painswick; and its repertoire is likewise much broader than of yore, with plenty of new music, young artists, children’s concerts, and even, quaintly, a pipe and tabor workshop, to go with the familiar Elgar, Finzi, Vaughan Williams and Holst, the organ recitals and the vicarage tea parties, the coach trips and the memorial talks.

Singing for Life, BBC Four/ Gazza's Tears, ITV1

Gifted young South Africans try to sing their way out of the township

I once sat in a rehearsal room in a brick-box theatre on the outskirts of Cape Town. The cast was warming up for Carmen. First, the choreographer put 40 mostly black South African singers through a gruelling physical warm-up. Opera singers are rarely slender, and they were all in a muck sweat by the time the vocal coach stepped forward to lead them through a vocal warm-up. But when they opened their mouths it was as if someone has strapped you to a chair in a wind tunnel. The noise was transforming, majestic, all-powerful. So I knew roughly what sound to expect in Singing for Life, a documentary about the miscegenation of the black township choral tradition and the white man’s most exclusive art form, opera.

Gareth Goes to Glyndebourne, BBC Two

Spot the tune: the bar goes higher for choirmaster Malone

We love Gareth Malone, don’t we? We are big fans of the Pied Piper of primetime. And so we should be. The youth of today seem impressively eager to down tools, put away childish things like knives and drugs and safe-cracking equipment, and follow this slightly weedy and totally uncool choirmaster out onto the concert platform. Our glorious new coalition should be using him to tackle crime.

Turner Prize winner takes conceptual art to new heights

Martin Creed recreates Work No. 409 for the Royal Festival Hall’s glass lift

Lift music is given a conceptual twist by former Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed this week. As part of the Southbank’s Chorus! festival, Creed has recreated his Work No. 409 especially for the Royal Festival Hall’s glass lift: as visitors go up and down the six-level lift, their ascent and descent will be charted by the rising or falling pitch of professional choristers Voicelab.

Bach B minor Mass, The Sixteen, Barbican Hall

Professional voices and period instruments spring through the greatest mass ever

As one who came to know the B minor Mass singing in a clogged, 150-strong choir, I welcomed the authentic-movement rush in the 1980s to  whittle it down to What Bach Might Have Wanted (if, indeed, he had lived to hear his ideal religious compendium performed in its entirety). For a while, it shrivelled to anorexic dimensions in the shape of Joshua Rifkin's one-voice-per-choral-line hypothesis.

Rachmaninov Vespers, Retrospect Ensemble, Cadogan Hall

New Romantic branding for former King's Consort takes time to warm up

In taking on a new name last year, Retrospect Ensemble and director Matthew Halls were aiming to get rid of the “early music” label that had been stapled on to them in their previous incarnation as the King’s Consort. When I spoke to Halls last April he was positively a-tremble at the thought of putting on Brahms and Schumann with his newly rebranded group. If you think that sounds like what a lot of these so-called “early music” conductors have been doing, you’re right – it’s very much the done thing to have an illicit romp on the leather sofa of romanticism. And why not? If it works it’s surely something to get excited about. Last night’s programme certainly offered that something: Rachmaninov’s sublime all-night Vespers.

Lucumi Choir, St John's Church, Waterloo

Cuban Afro-Catholic ritual comes to London for Christmas

As we gathered in St John’s Church in Waterloo last Thursday to hear The London Lucumi Choir perform, on the same day people in their thousands were making the pilgrimage to the Church of San Lazaro in Cuba. In that church, just outside Havana, pilgrims walk or sometime crawl the few miles to the Church, often bearing gifts of rum and cigars as penitence.  It is a sign of the times that songs to the orishas – the deities that populate the Yoruba religious pantheon, who all have their own distinctive, trance-inducing rhythms – can also be heard in a Christian church in London.
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