“The gentlemen of Synergy Vocals were on form.  (They) added an edge quite lacking elsewhere, rendering the Family’s hypocrital bourgeois morality all the more repellent”

Boulezian

For full details of future performances, reviews, diaries and other information, keep checking our website at www.synergyvocals.com

L-R:  Tom Bullard, Olivia Robinson, Joanna Forbes L’Estrange, (Marin Alsop), Micaela Haslam, Heather Cairncross, Andrew Busher

“Voices of Light was a new piece for us and we always love a new project!  The music by Richard Einhorn was inspired by and designed to run alongside the famous 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer.  Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s performance of Joan is astonishing and the whole is extremely moving, indeed harrowing at times.

The piece is scored for strings, wind, a synthesiser (for church bells), chorus, SATB soli, and “the voice of Joan” which can be sung by four early music female voices (Anonymous 4 on the CD – mostly doubling two to a part), or two voices, or the S and A soli could sing these sections in straighter tones.  We opted for the second version.  I was very keen to have these passages sounding completely different from the rest of the ensemble, giving a “churchy” feel to the chant-like simple lines of music.

Much of the piece is in ancient French, so we called upon the services of Michel Vallat to help us with the text.  We were given a pronunciation guide, made by one of the Anon 4 singers, which was extremely helpful up to a point, but the American accent gave the words a bit of a twang which we wanted to extract for our London performance.  You never know how many “experts” you’re going to have in your audience!

It was great to have Olivia Robinson on the team for the first time.  There is very little I have come across that she can’t sing, but having recently attended one of our Steve Reich events (straight, repetitive singing on close microphone), Olivia had requested that I never ask her to do a Synergy gig!  So how could I resist?  Although we were being amplified for this project, the quartet needed to be much more soloistic than for a Steve Reich concert.  When I heard the Einhorn CD, I immediately thought of Olivia not trying very hard – almost singing to herself.  I definitely made the right choice.  The quiet sections were absolutely stunning, then when she had a string of fortissimo top C’s, they were even more impressive!

The team with Richard Einhorn

Heather, Andy and Tom also had their fair share of pearly solo moments, and they all sang brilliantly.  Joanna L’Estrange and I sang “as one”, providing the voice of Joan.  It was lovely to hear from members of the choir, orchestra and audience that we sounded exactly the same, and that you couldn’t tell when we were singing in unison until the parts diverged.  It’s lovely to hear comments like that, because we really do care about getting the right voices for each piece we sing.  There is no such thing as a “soprano” or an “alto” beyond a vague notion of range.  Every singer sounds completely different from the next, and some are more able than others to modify the way they sing in order to find the “right” sound in any given situation.

We had our lovely friend Ian Dearden (Sound Intermedia) on the desk, so we knew we were in safe hands.  The monitor sound for Jo and I was critical in helping us create the right mood for our “Joan” sections.  A higher mix than usual, with some added reverb, ended up being just the thing to persuade us that we were in a big church, rather than on the dry Barbican stage.

Our conductor, Marin Alsop, was absolutely delightful, extremely efficient and wonderfully clear.  It was a real pleasure to work with her, and I sincerely hope that our paths cross again.  We have another LSO project coming soon (January and February 2012 – Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins) so, happily, we know it won’t be too long before we see our player friends again.

Voices of Light was our final big concert of 2011 and it was a great way to end an amazing season of exciting projects.  Who knows what 2012 and 2013 will bring…..I love my job!”

Micaela

“De Staat…the reason for buying this disc”

The Guardian

“Synergy Vocals displayed a remarkable technical prowess”

Dernières Nouvelles D’Alsace

L-R: Andrew Busher, (Simon Stockhausen), Heather Cairncross, (David Robertson), Gerry O’Beirne, Micaela Haslam, Simon Grant, Amanda Morrison, Mike Dore, Rachel Weston

We were staying at the Hotel an der Oper, which was perfectly situated for the concert hall and the centre of town. There is also a really excellent, and reasonably priced, Italian restaurant on the ground floor – hurrah!

English Garden

Concert hall

View from my chair

The concert went really well, and David managed to draw out yet more detail from this incredible piece of music.  I wonder whether there is another conductor who knows Sinfonia as well as he does.  Every time we sing the piece with David, we discover things in the orchestral parts that we’ve never heard before.  I love the fact that his interpretation of the piece never seems to be pre-conceived; it always sounds spontaneous.

After the concert

Munich airport was a complete nightmare on the way home, and gets the prize for the longest check-in queue I’ve ever encountered.  It took about 40 minutes to get near a desk!  But the good news is that, weeks later, my roses are still going strong – so I’m very glad I made the effort to bring them home!”

Micaela

Richard Einhorn Voices of Light
LSO conducted by Marin Alsop
November 2011

“… the singing by Synergy Vocals was glorious”

illuminationsmedia.co.uk

L-R: Andrew Busher, Amy Haworth, Phillip Conway Brown, Rachel Weston, Simon Grant, Heather Cairncross, Tom Bullard, Micaela Haslam, Claire Underwood, Amanda Morrison

“It’s always a real treat to work with the LSO, so we’d been looking forward to this project for a while. The Desert Music doesn’t come up very often. It’s a big piece to put on, but so exhilarating to play and listen to, I wish more orchestras would give it a go. It may also be that programmers look at the score and worry that they’ll need a massive orchestra and a huge chorus. In Synergy, we use ten individual amplified singers, which works equally well with the full orchestral version and the reduced version (more manageable for smaller orchestras) – and we take up hardly any room on stage!

Our first rehearsal with the orchestra and the conductor Kristjan Järvi was at St Luke’s – the LSO’s current base. With all the extra percussion, keyboards and brass involved in this full version, we were completed packed in there – singers right at back, miles away from the conductor.

The difficulty for us was that we couldn’t hear the six marimba players who were right at the front, under the conductor’s nose. Steve Reich puts them there for a good reason – they are the rhythmic “engine” of the piece. Keeping such a large body of players together, ticking along at the same speed is no mean feat, and Kristjan clearly felt the need to beat ahead some of the time, in an effort to stop the piece from slowing down. The problem for us was that we couldn’t hear anything rhythmic (apart from ourselves in our monitors), so the only tempo we could take was Kristjan’s literal beat. That meant that our supposedly constant rhythmic patterns got a little bit sea-sick! In the end, we managed to persuade our lovely sound engineer, Ian Dearden, to put microphones on a couple of the marimbas – not for amplification, but simply to relay their sound into our monitors, thereby putting us in touch with the front of the stage. That was very helpful for us, but the poor keyboard players were still out on a limb. They needed to keep in time with us and the marimbas, but didn’t have monitors, so could hear neither. It must have been very frustrating for them – but they did brilliantly in the circumstances.

Waiting for the conductor

We were hoping that the Barbican might prove easier than St Luke’s, acoustically speaking, and indeed the morning rehearsal did feel a lot safer. By this stage we were feeling quite self-sufficient, having realised that we were pretty much on our own at the back! Kristjan referred to us as “the chorus”, which was mildly irritating – because we’re not a chorus, and we do have a name – but I decided to forgive him as he had recorded the piece recently with another orchestra and chorus, and apparently he wasn’t feeling very well.

The Barbican was packed for this Reich-fest and of course the great man himself was there, starting the concert with Clapping Music, ably assisted by Neil Percy.

Neil Percy with Steve Reich

Though I say it myself, we all did really well in the performance – particularly Amy and Mandy on the horrendously high top soprano line. We managed to keep together, though the first few bars of the piece were a bit of a surprise. It started well, the tempo was good, the keyboards were on track, then Kristjan seemed to speed up almost instantly. A bit of adrenalin is good for a live performance, but there was a bit too much of it on page one for my liking! Still, the LSO was marvellous, we all made it to the end in one piece, the audience was happy, and so was Steve – which is the main thing.

Kristjan Järvi with Steve Reich

The LSO is one of our favourite orchestras to work with. We always have fun in rehearsals, and we have many good friends among the players. Roll on next month when we have another project with them – accompanying a famous old silent film – very exciting!”

Micaela