TRIP TO TUSCANY
21 - 25 OCTOBER 2006
As the climax of the Sinfonia Chorale's 40th Anniversary Year in 2006 (and to fulfill the Chairman's dream) nearly two thirds of the choir members, together with some spouses and partners travelled with Richard Roddis to Tuscany in October 2006 to sing in some of its wonderful cathedrals and churches. Our programme was a shortened version of that for the Autumn Concert: parts of Palestrina's Missa Brevis and Pizzetti's Requiem Mass, together with motets by Byrd, Harris and Leighton.
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Saturday | Sunday | Monday| Tuesday| Wednesday
Saturday - The longest day: meeting at midnight ... lost in Liverpool ... Bathhouses and funiculars
It was a long journey, starting at midnight in Clifton, a coach ride to Liverpool Airport, a long wait and confusion (including standing on the tarmac wondering which plane to get on to), a cramped flight on a Ryanair plane with non-reclining seats, trying to snatch some sleep, another coach journey - first through the Arno delta past Pisa, and then past hills terraced with marble quarries, and eventually into Montecatini Terme and the Royal Palace Hotel. Lunch for many of us was pizzas in the cafe on the corner, and very satisfactory.
The afternoon was spent variously resting and, in unseasonably mild
weather, exploring the town : a modern one whose raison d'etre was its
spa. There were streets full of hotels, and a few hundred metres up
the road was the park in which there was an amazing variety of bath
houses. Mostly these were built one to three hundred years ago, and
ranged from the Romanesque with dignified pillars and tiled pavements to
the naff. (This curious mixture of high style and kitsch was
repeated everywhere we went, not least within the hotel itself, whose
decor boasted 
enormous pictures of questionable taste.) The
bathhouses offered massages and cures for all ills, mentionable and
intimate.
Back to the hotel for a rehearsal in a tiny room.
In the evening a five-course meal was followed (by those with the energy) by a night time trip to Montecatini Alto, the old town on the hilltop above. The trip was made by a 100-year-old funicular which rattled up the steep slope every half-hour. Others joined the Italian evening promenade through the town centre, where people of all ages showed off their style - what a contrast from Nottingham city centre at the same time.
Bed and mosquito bites.
Sunday - Florence ...
but first, a trip up in the funicular in the daylight, though with mist and low cloud, the view was disappointing. A tower with a
six-hour clock puzzled us.
Our rehearsal was appreciated too well by hotel guests who interrupted enthusiastically with questions and congratulations.
Contemplating a long and difficult day in Florence we asked for our guide Emily's help and she performed one of the miracles for which she soon became noted, organising somewhere for us to leave our concert gear while we explored the city. So a crocodile bearing black clothes threaded its way past the Duomo to the little church of Santa Maria dei Ricci on the Via del Corso a block and less than five minutes walk further south. This church was not in any of the guidebooks, but it turned out to be a seventeenth century gem. We waited on the street until the verger arrived with his dog and let us in to dump our clothes and queue for the single loo.
See Florence in two hours....? well, between us we managed to do an
impressive variety of things, though getting into the art galleries wasn't
among them. So back to the church a little after five, a quick
change and with sudden formality we approached the Duomo, entering by a side
entrance. We found our seats under the great dome, and sat and
looked and wondered. The confused noise of the earlier service
echoed from the transept. A bored couple of men behind us operated
the PA system. Another young man negotiated between Richard and the
clergy, and we had a sudden change of programme (no Agnus Dei - parts of
the Mass were not to be sung). The seats at the front of the nave
and those around us close to the altar gradually filled up for the
People's Mass. It appeared that we were sitting in the customary seats
of some of the worshippers, but since these were roped off for us they had
to accept it.
As our service began it became immediately clear that we'd have to contend with a fifteen second echo that amplified and confused background noises, speech, intoning and our singing: quite a challenge to hear each other properly, but we did our best. In a long sermon in Italian we heard the words, 'Crescendo, crescendo...' but most of the rest passed most of us by. We'd been asked to sing 'classical' works in Latin: we managed two of these, but our change of programme meant that we had to sing one of Byrd's English anthems, and our last piece was by Leighton, modern, in English and loud. However, as the service finished, the congregation broke into spontaneous applause: very gratifying.
As we left to find a meal an American couple approached one of us to ask what this big building was: they chose the right person, a National Trust guide, who gave them an expert exposition on the Duomo, the Campanile and the Baptistery. Hurried Pizzas for most, and then back to Santa Maria dei Ricci through the dark but still very busy evening streets.
This 9 pm concert was magic. The little church had filled up with an international audience (we had produced programmes in Italian
and English, but were asked for French) and the verger and his dog.
As we began to sing we found that the acoustic was wonderful - we could do
anything - the music almost sang itself. The door of the church was
left open and as people promenaded past in the street, we saw them stop,
listen and come forward into the church to sit down. Others stood at
the back. At the end it was clear that everyone had shared the
experience of something special. An American told us to come back
next year and sing in Rome. A vicar from Holland said that he was coming to
England and would come to hear us.
Afterwards we received two emails from a member of the audience: to the choir as a whole he wrote:
A note to tell you that the concert you gave in Santa Maria dei
Ricci in Firenze was the musical highlight of my seven weeks in Italia.
I loved your feeling for Palestrina and Byrd, and the Pizzetti, with
which I was unfamiliar, wowed me. Keep up the good work. I'll watch for
your next tour.
And to Richard he wrote:
I sent a note from your website to congratulate the whole choir for the wonderful performance they gave on Sunday night in Firenze. To you I can only say “Bravo”. Your coaching, directing, and programming are fantastic. The choir got the most enthusiastic response from any audience at the two dozen or so musical events I attended in my six or seven weeks in Italy this fall. And it deserved it.
We went back to the hotel elated.
Monday: Sienna, San Gimignano and Montecatini
A prompt start and a coach trip through Tuscan hills
and traffic jams to Sienna. After a group visit to the
one public toilet in the town we walked through stone-slabbed streets to
the Campo, the famous semi-circular piazza - difficult to imagine how this
could be the course of the twice yearly Palio. 
We scattered, finding
that one of the most interesting museums was closed, but in compensation
the illustrated floor of the cathedral was uncovered for cleaning. Perhaps most interesting
was the library where enormous books of antiphon plainchant, beautifully
illuminated, were displayed below a spectacular series of brightly-coloured
frescos illustrating the life of a fifteenth century pope. 
In the
choir, behind the altar, we found a music stand big enough to take the
books, and realised that they were so big so that the whole choir could
read from a single copy. Snatched lunch and a rendezvous in the
Campo, back to the coach, and another trip
to...
San Gimignano, perched on its hilltop with its unique towered
profile. Cafés, tower-climbing, views,
a harp in the cathedral
courtyard, the whole bible in a comic-strip fresco inside the cathedral,
and the wine....
Back to Montecatini for another five-course meal, enlivened by a French group beginning theirs with a long and loud ritual chant, involving waving napkins around their heads. Then we walked a few hundred metres to the modern church of Santa Maria Assunta to prepare for our second concert. We were obviously getting tired - at least three of us left things behind at the hotel. Monday evening is not one for Italians to go out much, and the audience was sparser, though again, with the doors open, passers-by came in and listened.
A well-earned drink, and bed.
Tuesday: Lucca and Pisa
Another prompt start, and a much shorter drive to Lucca.
Although on the tourist circuit, Lucca was much less crowded and more
relaxed than the other towns we visited. It had three gems of
churches, a tower with trees on it, an oval piazza where the Roman
amphitheatre was, and wonderful broad medieval 
walls along which one could
stroll among the autumn-coloured trees. It also had every square
filled with plastic tenting, in preparation for a festival of comics and
games. Back to the coach, and - someone was missing!
What to do? we didn't have their mobile phone number. Were they
ill? hurt? arrested?? No - they'd just misread their map and
were at the coach stop at the other end of the town.
So, to Pisa, where Emily performed another miracle and again found a room for us to leave our concert gear. Pisa had a greater
concentration of sightseers and tourist tat sales than anywhere we had yet
seen, but I'm sure that if we had walked a couple of blocks away from the
area round the cathedral we would have found a pleasant quiet town.
But the cathedral complex would be spectacularly beautiful even if the
tower didn't lean. Our group had an 
excellent meal in the shadow of
the tower, and then we went to baptistery to explore its famous
acoustics. Unfortunately these were only demonstrated at certain
times and our attempt to try them for ourselves was firmly squashed.
The choir and its entourage were allowed into the cathedral by the uniformed bouncers, through a side door, and guided to the area in front of the altar, where a hundred or so seats were roped off for the audience. Unfortunately, the only audience allowed by the bouncers were the ten or so non-singers of our own party: others who gathered to listen had to stand outside the rope, and one unfortunate person who had the temerity to sit down was quite firmly told to move. The acoustics were the opposite of those in Florence - there was no reverberation at all. But we sang to our enthusiastic claque and then did as much sight-seeing as we could before being rushed outside to be photographed on the steps at the west end. Interesting how many passing tourists joined the photographers!
Jean organised us a group climb up the leaning tower - a slightly disconserting experience as the visual cues did not warn of the changes in angle and pitch of the steps. At the top the slight air of insecurity continued..
Back to Montecatini for (an open air swim for the hardy and then) our last five-course meal accompanied by the enthusiastic French group. Our guide Emily and Julian, whose baby this trip was, were thanked.
And then for many a final trip up the funicular and perhaps the best singing of the tour...
Wednesday: Home again
With Emily's help we managed to get up later than scheduled and have a sit-down breakfast. But it was still an early start, and our journey to Pisa was through dawn mists with spectacular skies.
The trip home was uneventful except that the fresh cool, wet Atlantic air of Liverpool was quite a surprise.
It's difficult for one person to summarise the experience of a group of nearly forty, but I feel that it has been a very special experience, with some particular highlights - the Florence concert being the greatest. And we got to know and like each other a lot better.
Thank you Julian
Thank you Richard
and thank you Emily
Pictures by Christine, Diane, Gary and Tom.
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