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Much of my interest in classical music has been fuelled by membership of various choirs since my days at the University of Tasmania at Hobart. This page gives a variety of links to the various choirs I’ve participated in and sung with over the years, and a separate page contains a concert diary/worklist.
I resided at Jane Franklin Hall for the first two years of my baccalaureate. I was incredibly fortunate to get off to a good start by meeting John Panckridge upon first arriving in Hobart to organise my accomodation; a friend (AJF) who had already arranged for a tour of the college arrived at exactly the same time I did, so I free-loaded along with him. John was (and still is) second bassoon with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and he then sang with an affiliated semi-professional ensemble (the Jane Franklin Consort) as well as directing the college’s decidedly amateur choir. After hearing the Consort perform at my matriculation, and suitable bribery from John, I joined the college choir and quickly found myself to be the only male tenor – or rather, the only baritone with sufficient range!
The choir’s repertoire was confined to very simple four-part stuff (which most of the choir found challenging enough), and we occasionally performed at the twice-weekly academic dinners and other college events. On one occasion the denizens of Low Table dressed up as psuedo-John Panckridges with bushy black beards to join the choir for a performance of Peter Billam’s arrangement of "I Heard it on the Grapevine"; although the entire choir was supposed to be similarly attired, I was mistaken for being on Low Table by dint of having obtained an extra black beard.
Having the confidence and ability to sing solo I soon found my talents being used for the college’s theatrical productions (as most of the actors cast were not singers).
My fellow tenor (though more often alto, naturally) at J.F.H. was Susannah Terwiel, and although she was by no means a fan of Beethoven, one day while passing through the Tunnel under Churchill Avenue she pointed out a flyer advertising TUMS’ forthcoming concert of the Choral Symphony in conjunction with the TSO. This immediately interested me (even though I already had subscription tickets to the concert), and so the two of us resolved to attend a rehearsal and join up.
I was subsequently in TUMS for the next three years during which time I was active on the committee as concert manager and a general representative. It was rather an accident that I sang tenor, as at first I had a very light falsetto which I was obliged to use for most of the higher tenor range, although I quickly came to be glad of the mistake.
Ian Burk, the conductor of TUMS, also happened to be the Master of Music at St David’s Cathedral. I had attended a few services at the Cathedral and was aware that a core of adult singers in TUMS were also in the Cathedral Choir. I was on the verge of being recruited into the servers’ group (possibly a fate worse than death) when Ian invited me to sing with the choir; on my first Sunday while the choir was singing the Agnus Dei of Schubert’s Mass in G, one of the Bishop’s sons (who then happened to be the sub-deacon) slipped on the steps and dropped a chalice of communion wine, and scenes of high farce involving the Dean and a tea towel ensued.
Singing new music on a weekly basis at the Cathedral quickly improved my sight-reading if nothing else, and after a couple of years I was capable of singing anything which was put in front of me. On Thursday September 17 1992 however the Dean summarily sacked Ian, and when the Dean turned up to the usual Thursday evening rehearsal that night, he alluded to reasons for the sacking which he could not make public. (I can verify in part the claims made here; in particular, see the fourth-last paragraph recounting this particular meeting.) The meeting was attended by parents of the boy choristers and the Alto, Tenor, and Bass Lay Clerks of the choir; the upshot was that we were most unconvinced by the Dean’s allegations, and so the choir went on strike en bloc; we got our pictures in The Australian, and were interviewed for ABC News and A Current Affair. Happily for Ian the sacking was eventually found to be “harsh, unjust and unfair”.
After being in TUMS for a year and having read of similar university choral societies around the country in the pages of Erato, I took the opportunity to get away for a fortnight to attend Melbourne IV, which ran two concerts in late-January/early-February of 1991. More on this elsewhere! I was Librarian for the subsequent choral festival held in Launceston and Hobart, at which John O’Donnell conducted Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 and works by Giovanni Gabrieli, Praetorius, and Schütz. Unfortunately I contracted the Lurgi so that in the concert my voice lasted only through the first half of the Vespers – before this an eagle-eyed Penny Sharpe had noticed I was singing these entirely from memory.
In 1991 I was invited to sing with the Conservatorium Chorale by its conductor of long standing, Edward Talbot, who had observed the previous year that I had memorised the entire tenor part of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana! The two or three concerts I did were marred by serious problems of musicianship here and there.
In 1992 the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra decided to put together its own chorus for a concert performance of Verdi’s La traviata, by calling for auditions from all of Hobart’s leading choirs, and so I think I was head-hunted owing to my connections with TUMS, Chorale, and St David’s, any of which would have stood me in good stead. I never ended up auditioning however, owing to the severe cold I had contracted at Hobart IV, but was allocated to Tenor II nonetheless. At the very first rehearsal I was the only chorister to have brought a full vocal score, which was immediately needed for the repetiteuse! Unfortunately in its first couple of years the TSO chorus was rather sparingly used, supporting a concert peformance of Puccini’s La Bohème and appearing in a program of minor Mozart works in the following year.
When I moved to Melbourne I sang for three years with John O’Donnell’s concert choir Ensemble Gombert, which usually performs music of the Renaissance, particularly the Flemish school of Josquin, Gombert, and Clemens non Papa. I also sang with the choir of St Peter’s Eastern Hill under Christopher Cook, and occasionally I have performed with Schola Cantorum directed by Dr Gary Ekkel, St Patrick’s Cathedral Singers with Dr Geoffrey Cox, Melbourne Chorale with Jonathan Grieves-Smith, and the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Society (RMPS) with Andrew Wailes. Currently I sing alto or tenor with the Melbourne University Choral Society (MUCS), also directed by Andrew Wailes, and Gloriana vocal ensemble directed by Andrew Raiskums.
The text on this page is © copyright Philip Legge 2001–2005. All rights reserved.
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Last update, GC 2005-10-19: Minor update.