Nicola Lisle chats to Oxford Bach Choir’s conductor Adrian Partington

Singers of all levels of experience will be joining the Oxford Bach Choir at the SJE next week to tackle one of the most challenging works in the choral repertoire.

Following the success of its Come and Sing Verdi’s Requiem last year, the choir is now giving the same treatment to Tallis’s glorious Spem in Alium, with last year’s conductor, Adrian Partington, once again wielding the baton.

As a former associate conductor of the OBC, Adrian is delighted to be returning to Oxford to conduct what is, to him, a remarkable work.

“It’s in 40 parts, which is unusual in itself – there’s only two or three pieces ever written like that – and it has a wonderfully haunting melody and a most extraordinary harmonic movement,” he says.

“It’s the astonishing intricacy of the part writing that I find just extraordinary, and the beauty of the scoring, the way all the voices are combined and how the whole thing’s wonderfully balanced.

“Sometimes there’s 20 voices singing, sometimes there’s 30, sometimes it’s choirs one and two, sometimes it’s choirs seven and eight. The invention of it is without parallel. It is intellectually staggering.”

It sounds the kind of work only professional singers could handle, I suggest to Adrian.

“It was written for 40 professional solo singers, boys and men of the Chapel Royal, the best singers that were around London in the 1550s,” he concedes.

“But I don’t see anything against doing it with an all-comers choir. The individual tunes are not that difficult, and provided people count, it’s possible to make a musical performance of it.

“If you do these vast pieces with choirs of all standards, of course they’re not going to sound like the composer intended, but to me, the more important thing is giving people the opportunity to feel what these pieces are like from the inside.”

Now that Gareth Malone has got the nation singing, there is a growing feeling that singing really is for everyone. And the rewards can be huge.

Adrian agrees: “There’s nothing better. Community singing is a really good thing. There’s nothing better than being part of a group, singing your heads off.

“No drug or alcohol can match the kind of adrenalin rush you get when you’re all singing something together, and that is what I feel people get out of singing on these workshop days, especially something as challenging as Spem in Alium.”

So inexperienced singers shouldn’t be put off from coming along to the Come and Sing?

“No, they shouldn’t. Everyone should feel like it’s a shared endeavour because the experienced singers help the less experienced ones.

“The music is being sent out in advance, so everybody’s got a chance to prepare, and then come together in that wonderful church, 300 of us in total, and just give it a good go.”

If you don’t fancy singing, but still want to be part of the experience, audiences are obviously welcome too.

“We can’t pretend it will be anything like the Christ Church Cathedral Choir or similar,” says Adrian. “But it will be worth coming along to see, because it’s a spectacle indeed.”

Where and when
Come and Sing
Spem in Alium
St John the Evangelist Church, Iffley Road, Oxford
November 7, 9.30am sje-oxford.org