Retail Monopoly

I was less than overjoyed when Co-op took over Somerfield, leaving us two Co-ops.  Not good for choice when both in-town supermarkets stock identical ranges.

But Co-op’s mini-monopoly is about to be eclipsed.  I just passed the recently-closed Stead and Simpson, hitherto our big(-ish) shoe shop, and one of the biggest shops on the high street.  It’s being refurbished, and proclaims itself about to re-open as a St Luke’s Hospice shop.

Hang on!  We already have not one but two St Luke’s in town!  How the **** do they justify three shops (two of them large) within one minute’s walk of each other in a small market town’s high street?  This is clearly an organisation with more money than it can spend.  I shall have to try and make a point of avoiding events that contribute further to that excess!

Concert

Our next concert is overdue a mention here.  Sunday March 17^th at the Guildhall, Plymouth.  Programme is one of french romantic music: Fauré’s Requiem and Gounod’s Messe Solennelle de Sainte Cécile.

The Fauré is of course very familiar: it’s a regular in any choral singer’s repertoire, and on the radio and in concert programmes for those who just listen.  The Gounod is less familiar (it’s new to me) but a lovely piece.  It’s also very, very simple, and really only calls for a single rehearsal to prepare it.  Should be a good concert for readers within evening-out distance of Plymouth.

A tale of fail

There is a longer tale behind this concert, which I’ve been meaning to blog about for a long time.  A bizarre and rather sorry tale that has evolved even since I first should have blogged.  So here goes ….

The Gounod is a last-minute substitution.  We should have been performing a newly-commissioned work alongside the Fauré.  Indeed, I assume the choice of such a familiar work was not least to give us plenty of rehearsal time for something new and perhaps challenging.

It started about two years ago, when a competition for the commission was announced.  This caught my interest: I’ve composed a few trivial little pieces, and writing something substantial has been a pipe-dream since my teens.  So I spent a good chunk of the summer of 2011 planning a masterwork, selecting poems as text, and composing an entry for the competition.  In addition to the creative process, that involved organisation and due diligence: for example, checking copyright on the poems I planned to set (and dropping one of them), and checking the orchestral requirements for the Fauré to minimise the additional resources my work would demand.

The submission date was early autumn of 2011.  I submitted my entry, including three completed movements (13 minutes music) of eleven planned.  I did it for my own pleasure, with no expectation of actually winning the commission – which had been widely advertised in mainstream music fora nationally and internationally.  I’d have been surprised and delighted to get it, but also very happy to find myself singing someone else’s work.  May the best man or woman win!

Instead I was surprised and disappointed by what happened.  Not only was I unsuccessful, so was everyone else.  The goalposts moved, and instead of awarding the commission to one of the 54 entries, they instead commissioned an up-and-coming composer on the basis of his having won prestigious national awards.  That was late autumn of 2011, with nearly a year from then to complete the work (as per the original timetable), and it was on hearing the competition result that I had originally intended to go public in this blog.

Fast-forward to November last year and the work duly arrives.  Followed by another change of plan and another disappointment: the powers that be consider this work unsuitable, and we’re not going to perform it.  Nor even see it, so I can’t offer any comment on whether I’d like it and/or consider it suitable.

Hence the Gounod, a substitution dictated by practical considerations like availability of scores at short notice more than for musical reasons.  A lovely piece, but what a disappointment – twice!