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Friday 5 September 2008

Morality takes to the stage

Henrietta Bredi joins in the preparations for Vaughan Williams's 'The Pilgrim's Progress'

‘Come, thou blessed of the Lord’ sing the sopranos and altos, and now the tenors and basses are joining them, with a wondrously layered swelling of sound. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end — this is the first rehearsal and the first music I’ve heard from Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which will be given two performances at Sadler’s Wells, on 20 and 22 June.

VW, as some people matily refer to him (personally, I wouldn’t dare), died 50 years ago, and celebrations of his life and work are abounding. One of the composer’s most passionate and articulate admirers is Richard Hickox, who is conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in a series of concerts of his music, including a complete cycle of his symphonies, throughout 2008. As a splendidly ambitious step-up from their concert-hall activities, he and the Philharmonia are tackling The Pilgrim’s Progress in a realisation that will put the entire orchestra on stage, plus a 50-strong chorus and 15 soloists.

I have been called in to co-ordinate the final phases of this enterprise, a responsibility which I view with what is, I hope, a healthy combination of excitement and alarm. There are a great many people to look after, but something I am consistently impressed and delighted by in the world of music and theatre is the level of trust involved and, closely intertwined with that, the level of skill and professionalism. From the outside it may appear as if putting on performances is a freewheeling, happy-go-lucky sort of affair — ‘Let’s do the show right here!’ — but in reality it all hangs on rigorous discipline along with complex scheduling and careful allocation of time. Commitment to achieving the highest possible standards is a given and everyone is expected to come up with the goods.

In the case of the chorus members who I heard at their first rehearsal, this meant being musically prepared and ready to refine and develop their interpretation. In my case, it meant, among other things, making sure that their vocal scores were waiting for them, in the right place and at the right time. As I watched each of them arrive and casually pick up a score from the top of the pile, I realised that they of course had no idea that the Philharmonia’s music librarian and I had been chasing the publishers for weeks, and had been by no means certain that we could provide the scores when needed as they were in fact in Australia until frighteningly close to the deadline.

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