Lots of Choirs!

It's been a while since I've posted something, but I hope to post a lot in the next few days as there's plenty of stuff to write about. Last weekend I took part in the 4th International Kraków Choir Festival, bringing together about 30 choirs from 11 different countries, including Northern Ireland and Singapore (!) The festival was arranged over four days, with concerts and a contest divided into a number of different categories. I had a chance to sing in two of these contests and hear, all told, around 11 hours worth of live choral music. One thing that I have always loved about Kraków is that there's almost always something cultural going on, and quite a few of them (such as this festival) are free and things that you just sort of stumble into. 

Now, I've been in some choir or another since middle school, except for a small break the last two years of college, but I think there's only been one time prior to this one where I spent so much time wrapped up in music.

The choral festival was a good educational experience as it illustrated variables that go into making a group sound good or awful. For one thing, unless you are absolutely sure of your group, don't have them perform Mozart: every little error a choir makes is instantly noticeable in the vast majority of his works. One contest was an excellent illustration of how difficult it is to sing in the morning: there was one group that had serious problems singing at 10AM but was very good at 7PM. In the morning, the tenors clearly had not warmed up sufficiently and were missing the top third of their range. A men's choir from Northern Ireland had serious issues one evening but was extremely good the next day, partly in response to the acoustics of the churches in which they sang. The concert in which these gentlemen had trouble was one in which there was both a considerable echo and yet "dead" for the performers: when our group sang there, I had a hard time hearing anybody except for myself, the guy next to me, and the woman in front of me, and that plays havoc with tuning, balance, and blend. When the same choir was in another space, one that was smaller and "warmer", those problems disappeared. 

My two picks for best-in-show were the group from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a group from the University of Malmo in Sweden. The judges more or less agreed.  Both of these choirs picked some very difficult pieces to perform from the standpoints of difficult and/or strange cords to tune, ones where diction and phrasing were of paramount importance, some that were polyphonic and others where entrances and exits had to be very exact, otherwise the piece would fall apart. The technique of both groups was truly superb and I was very happy to listen to about an hour worth of music from each group.

The awards for best-dressed, however, go to a men's choir from Sweden who dressed in white-tie attire with Student caps, which I understand are a very European (and particularly Nordic) thing. Imagine, if you will, Count Dracula inexplicably wearing what looks like a U.S. Navy officer's cap, and you get the idea. Runner-up goes to a Polish choir from Kraków that not only dressed in elaborate red robes, but also had the guts (or insanity) to add choreography to a piece written by J.S. Bach! There were also some children's choirs who were very cute and also quite good for their age group. One group of Russian girls between the ages of about 7 and 12 was absolutely adorable, particularly in terms of the various ways they handled being on stage: some kind of stared around the church in awe, others were very, very serious and still others were smiling their heads off but attentive. Right before the first pitch was given, two choristers even came sprinting down the aisle, having missed lining up earlier. Finally, after the final piece was finished and the director took his bows, the look of relief on his face was understated yet priceless.

My parents were in town for this particular extravaganza, and I think it was a treat for both of them. My mom did a lot of performing as a violinist when she was younger, and I think she sometimes misses it. This also gave her the insider perspective on what was going on.

There are some other differences I've noticed when singing with a Polish choir, but that, alas, is another post.

Trip to Hungary

Stefan Batory, King of Poland 1576-1586, but a Hungarian by birth

Polak, Węgier — dwa bratanki,
i do szabli, i do szklanki

- Poles and Hungarians are brothers,
with both sabers and shot-glasses

Lengyel, magyar — két jó barát,
együtt harcol s issza borát.

- A Pole, a Hungarian, good friends
fight and drink wine together

As the United States so amply demonstrates, any major world power is going to have a lot of people hating its guts. Poland, having been a major power in Eastern Europe, combined with the fact that Poland keeps getting invaded by Germans and Russians, doesn't really feel a lot of love from the neighbors. Heck, from what I understand even the Lithuanians aren't big fans of Poland, partly as the dual monarchy increasingly became the POLISH-Lithuanian Commonwealth as time went on. Like a pop song, Eastern Europe sometimes has me questioning, where is the love?

Well, there's an answer for that: Poland-Hungary. Interestingly enough, they were once part (or in Poland's case, part of it was part) of the same country for quite some time.

Then this happened

  The good feelings between the two countries appear to be very much mutual and very deeply rooted, as I saw on my recent tour of Hungary with the members of "Cantata", The Academic Choir of the Politechnika Krakowska. Indeed, the Hungarians helped the Poles during World War II, taking in a lot of Polish refugees and allowing them to live more or less normal lives despite the fact that Hungary was fighting on what our tour guide euphemistically referred to as "the other side" during World War II. In a museum, I saw a Polish language paper that was 1) well-printed and 2) reporting the death of Reinhard Heydrich, a.k.a. a Nazi so brutal and devoted it kind of creeped Hitler out, as a lead and very welcome story, two things that could never have happened together in Poland at the time. The Nazis weren't happy that Poles were taking refuge in Hungary, but apparently Admiral Horthy basically told Hitler to go peddle his watercolors. The Poles returned the favor by not taking part in the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Hungary in 1956, though in fairness the PRL government had a lot of problems close to home, like an uprising in Poznań. But still, they probably could have spared a few tanks if they had really wanted to.

Władysław Gomułka always kept some spare tanks lying around, just in case.

We spent the bulk of our tour around the shores of Lake Balaton, which is apparently the largest lake in Europe but actually quite shallow. We were hosted by the choir "VOX", in the town of Balatonboglar. And they took that hosting responsibility very seriously. I don't know how this trip was financed exactly, but all I know is I paid 150 złoty (about 50 bucks) for a five-day tour during which transportation, accommodation and meals were covered, and we had all of our dinners with VOX at places of their choosing, including one where the owner (and, as we found out, mayor of a neighboring town) was a tenor in the group. The surrounding area is good wine country, partly the result of ancient volcanic activity that left the northern edge of the lake looking oddly like The Lord of the Rings could have been filmed there. We had a chance to sample a considerable amount of said wine (all of it homemade), along with Palinka (also homemade), a fruit spirit with a taste somewhere between slivovitz and straight vodka. It was of course rather popular among our crowd, and I joked about starting a "Ruch Palinkota" back in Poland. 

Of course, having lengthy discussions with the members of the other choir was another matter entirely: nobody in our choir spoke Hungarian, and while we had an interpreter with us as well as a Polish woman who'd lived in Hungary for over 30 years as our guides, there were only two of them and 40 of us. Oddly, the attitude Poles have to the Hungarian language is an almost exact parallel to how Americans think about the Polish language, namely, "uh, how do you even pronounce it?" A few of us were able to have pleasant conversations with a Frenchman living in town in French, and German or Russian were generally the best bets to go with. Unfortunately, I don't know any of those languages ("ein bier, bitte" is about the extent of my German), so I was reduced to the few words of English anybody knew and wild gesticulations. This amused some of our choristers to no end, with one saying that despite the fact very little communication was going on, he'd never seen two people so engrossed in conversation as I was with an older gentleman, whose name is Imre.

Despite the language barrier, the climate was very warm and welcoming. We sang a few of our songs, they sang a few of theirs, there were a couple that we all knew so we sang together. And I even got to solo a couple of times on "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot!" And unless you count two persons who shall remain nameless (and genderless, though you can probably guess) who were drunkenly mulling over tying bedsheets together to sneak out of our hostel through the window after curfew, there were no particularly outrageous shenanigans I could see.

We sang two concerts and a mass on this trip, one concert in Balatonboglar together with VOX and a mass followed by a concert at the Polish parish church in Budapest. It's nice to sing in a mixed choir again, something I haven't done since high school and which I've missed for some time. I've been rather surprised at the amount of music our choir learns in a short span of time, and a few of those pieces hadn't been extensively rehearsed beforehand. However, I think both concerts went quite well and I have now sung my first piece in Hungarian.

Balatonboglar is a cute town of about 3,000 inhabitants and apparently hosts a horse race every year. We got to see guys driving two-horse hunting buggies through an obstacle course featuring a series of very sharp turns. The combination of traditional dress and traffic cones with tennis balls on top of them was a sight to see. We took a day trip to Keszthely to see some palace or another, inhabited by some seriously rich dudes who seriously built 103 rooms over a span of 200 years and 8 generations. The carriage house, currently a museum of carriages, is itself the size of about 2 American single-family homes, and American families don't stint on their housing space either. You're looking at a palace where the garage would be a nice place to live in. We had to put on slippers over our shoes before visiting the palace, as the floors were all wood parquet. The tour started to get boring after a while, as all the furnishings and portraits and Chinese vases and Italian furniture and French clocks and French vases and Chinese furniture and Italian clocks started to blend together. Though I risk my status as a card-carrying Republican saying it, I got a very visceral understanding of the appeal of socialism just by looking at that place.    

Budapest is continuing to be a tease. This was my second time in the city, but neither time could I claim to have really "seen" it. The first time was several years ago, driving to the Balkans and getting lost in Budapest in the rain. The second time (this one), we had four hours in the city. Our guide decided the best thing to do with those four hours was to show us all of the major sights at breakneck pace, including the most elaborate entrance to a swimming pool I have ever seen, with heavy Byzantine motifs celebrating washing one's hair. We also saw a Basilica, Parliament (from a distance), the Presidential Palace, and a subway station. We did see both Buda and Pest, and if I understood our guide correctly, Budapest is actually a city run on a federal system: each District governs itself. I wonder what happens if one of the decides to secede?

Pictured: Mayor of the XXI District

In other political news, I've heard that Hungary is unfortunately slipping down a semi-fascist path. Now, I didn't test this personally by standing in front of Parliament yelling "Viktor Orban is a schnook" and seeing what happened.

I doubt he would have been amused

Anyway, one of our singers asked one of the Hungarians about politics, and they said that things are gradually deteriorating to the point where if you're going to complain about the government, it's best to do it quietly or not at all. The EU has been worried about Hungary for quite some time, as the government has cracked down on press freedoms. The government itself is worried about the rise of a neo-Nazi party, Jobbik, which like all extremist groups does well when times are bad. It is all very unfortunate and I hope that both hard and softcore totalitarianism are just passing fads.

I had a wonderful time in Hungary, our hosts were fantastic and we had a chance to see a number of sights. I think I'd like to go back to Budapest, the question is now, how to find the time?