Viva Lewes Issue #135 December 2017

THE LOWDOWN ON...
Photo by Robert Knights
Conducting
Choral director John Hancorn
My experience as a professional singer pays
huge dividends when I work with choruses. I
worked as a baritone in operas and concert choruses,
all over the country and all over the world, for
15 or 20 years. I did my stint at Glyndebourne, and
the Royal Opera House. I first fell into conducting
in the early 80s.
I’ve learnt things from a lot of conductors I’ve
worked under. The biggest influence was the
Hungarian choral director Lazlo Heltay, who I
worked with in the Academy of St Martin in the
Fields Chorus. He was a magician: his ear for detail
and balance was extraordinary. When I started
conducting he gave me his ‘ten commandments of
choral singing’. The first was: ‘a choir is like a selfclearing
river. Gradually the silt disappears’. I can
still hear his voice.
Essentially conducting is about communicating.
About getting a group of people fired up. On the
night, your job is to energise the whole evening.
You’re driving the performance, enthusing and
motivating. You don’t need to be too flamboyant,
though, particularly if you’re dealing with experienced
musicians.
I’m always the musical director as well as the
conductor, which means I am there for the whole
process from choosing the repertoire to the concert
itself. It’s very much a collaboration. In fact you do
most of your work in rehearsal.
Some conductors shout their heads off at their
choruses. The Gordon Ramsay school of conducting.
I don’t agree with that. Quiet encouragement is
much better to get the best out of people. You need
to be musically demanding, but positivity is the key,
and lightness. I think of it as a way of making music
with colleagues.
I don’t use a baton. A stick doesn’t have five
fingers. I find my hands to be more expressive…
more malleable.
One of your main jobs is to keep the tempo.
With a chorus the tendency is for it to get too slow,
though tenors often get carried away like a galloping
horse, and go too fast. You’ve got to tread the
middle ground.
Things never fall apart on the night, touch
wood. Maybe you hear a glitch or two, but knowledgeable
as Lewes audiences are, you know you’ll
notice them more than the audience. The key is to
let it go and move on.
The performance has a life of its own: things
happen that don’t happen in rehearsal, and you have
to be flexible enough to let them happen. That’s
when the magic occurs.
You can’t let up, you can’t stop concentrating.
You have to be aware of every moment. It’s draining
and exhausting, but it’s exhilarating, too. It’s being
fully alive. I never enjoy a pint of lager more than
after a concert. You really do need a drink.
As told to Alex Leith
John Hancorn will be conducting the East Sussex
Bach Choir’s performance of Vivaldi’s Gloria (Saturday
9th, St Anne’s Church) and the Baroque Collective
Singers’ Handel’s Messiah (23rd, St Michaels, see
classical listings)
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