Category Archives: International

Interview with Bernice Chitiul

This interview took place online on 25 August 2020 between City’s Head of the Department of Music, Dr Ian Pace, and BMus graduate Bernice Chitiul.

Ian Pace: Today’s interview is with Bernice Chitiul, who graduated from the BMus programme in 2017. Bernice is an opera singer, who debuted as the Queen of the Night, in Mozart’s Magic Flute, with the Welsh National Opera Orchestra. She is also a pop singer and was a contestant in the Romanian National Selection for 5 consecutive years. She also works as a songwriter, Vocal/A Level & GCSE Teacher and music/video producer. See below for some links to films of Bernice.

(Bernice singing Vivaldi)

(A very different video from 2012)

IP: Bernice, it is great to see you again! Tell me some more about your musical background before you came to City? You were a renowned pop singer in Romania, then went to study at the Purcell School in London, yes?

Bernice Chitiul: My parents have been a source of musical inspiration since I was a child. They were a successful band until I arrived and ruined it all 😃 Of course the attention has shifted upon me ever since and my first original song was recorded by the time I was 4 years old entitled ”A Little Star”. I had a competition every week in Bucharest and for the rest of the days I would practice hard to get good results. I hardly had free time to spend with friends or for summer holidays. Even the Summer holiday was indeed spent at the sea side but for the Summer Contest that was happening there. This however implied that I would not be allowed to sunbathe, swim or enjoy the sea side because it would affect my singing performance as the salty air would affect my vocal folds 😃 Splendid. Most often competitions were on TV and I started making connections and so I was then invited to different Shows. Eventually I had to choose between X Factor and The Voice by the time I was called by the producers. This then led to the Eurovision Participations and slowly introduced my songwriting. On one of the shows I sang ”It is a man’s world” – James Brown & Pavarotti version which implied some classical singing too. I tried to experiment with classical singing back then, I fancied the idea of being an opera singer. One member of the jury said that If SHE could not combine both Pop and Opera singing techniques, she doubts that I will be able to. That was – funnily enough – the reason why I came to London and began my classical career 🙂 To try and see if it indeed is true. I went to Purcell School – in 2013 I had my first classical performance at the Wigmore Hall, which gave me an incredible boost in classical singing, and then chose to study at City University of London to get my 3 years intake of musical ”food” 🙂 Of course after a Master degree in Opera at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama let’s say that I master both pop and classical technique and yes, it is possible. It is thus best to believe in ourselves and work towards making our dream come true whatever that may be!

IP: How did you find the adjustment between the two very different types of singing, not least in terms of the physical requirements on the voice?

BC: I was so passionate about this aspect that I chose to reinforce the idea that a complete artist should be able to perform any type of music genre. I have outlined a journey from Pop to Jazz, Musical Theatre to Classical Singing in my major presentation at City University of London during my final year of study. I have explained the difference between the singing techniques and demonstrated it within a performance each. After doing my 5 years research, I then could shift from one technique to another easily. It feels like maths or music theory – once we use the perfect equation we will get the right result. Before I struggled having my larynx tired after singing only 20 minutes now I can sing as long as I wish and my voice will not get tired. Of course one needs to understand the difference between the tension on the vocal folds in both Pop and Opera.

IP: What made you choose City for your undergraduate studies?

BC: I chose City University because of the variety of modules it provides. The advanced Music Theory along with the Studio Recording/Music Production and Performance modules seemed to be just perfect for me. Also the Classical Style, 19th Century Opera Music and Composition module shaped my mindset completely to a higher level – just perfect for my next destination: Masters Degree.

IP: How did the ‘academic’ modules you studied (including studio-based ones) relate to what you were doing as a singer?

BC:The Music Theory module helped me understand the harmonic world and express myself better when talking about why the arias I sing the most are so touching. Also it enabled me to communicate with conductors and musicians in their musical language more efficiently. It enhanced my sight reading and not last, given that I am a songwriter too, I was eager to find smarter ways to compose music and approach interesting chord progressions.

The Composition and Studio Music Production added more boost to my songwriting and confidence.

The Classical Style module introduced me to relevant historic composers who made it in the music industry in a very clever way. One of the composers which had an impact on my songwriting and singing career was Haydn. He had to adapt to the English short and harmonically simple music, compose for the audience, sacrifice his vast harmonic knowledge to compose simple music, get the English audience’s attention/praise and progressively along the years make his compositions elaborate and longer. He educated his audience, and he succeeded. We all need to adapt and learn to smoothly elaborate any musical opportunity.

The 19th Century Opera Music module was a very concentrated package of information of about 60 renowned operas including music theory details, historic background, vocal analysis down to even the collaborative process between the composers and singers. This module was such a great knowledge boost to the Operatic world that was waiting for me just around the corner 🙂

IP: How about your ensemble work relating to African, Latin-American and other traditions?

BC: First of all I am very thankful for the fact that I was given the opportunity to coordinate my own ensemble module in the first year, called Berliozya. It gave me an opportunity to work with musicians, understand how to deal with individual musicians, organize/report rehearsal times and concerts. I also thank the members of the ensemble for choosing to be part of my module and taste how it would be like to work with other musicians within an ‘Opera House’ setting.

I totally loved being part of the Latin-American ensemble as I made progress in improvisation and complex rhythm writing. I also was very proud to find that later after I graduated I found myself knowing the most important songs that all the Latin American ensembles sing. I could very easily join them. It also helps me as a teacher – as I believe understanding rhythm is a key role in a successful musician and have a vast knowledge of Latin Music harmony too. Gamelan was a great ensemble to be in as well as it opened my musical horizons.

IP: What would you recommend to others thinking of studying music as part of higher education?

BC: I would recommend them to take into consideration that it may take a lot of effort, practice, sacrifice and patience. Sometimes we would have to adapt to new circumstances and if we do not have opportunities – to learn how to create them. For sure once one will finally make it, one will have a tremendous sense of achievement. City University of London would be the best place to study at as it is focused on individual careers with a lot of options to choose from. The teachers are interested in everyone’s achievement and very supportive.

IP: Bernice, thank you so much for this interview. Do you have any further links you would like to share with us?

BC: hank you for this conversation and thank you for keeping an eye on Alumni Students. Here is a performance I had at Eurovision 2018 in one of the most touristic salt mines in Romania. It was a great but also scary experience as this was a couple of miles underground. While I sang the high operatic parts my heart was in my mouth 😹

 

A Riot in Helsingborg

Two members of the City Music department recently travelled to Sweden for world premieres of new works commissioned by the London based Riot Ensemble.

PhD student Georgia Rodgers and Senior Lecturer Dr. Aaron Einbond were selected to take part in the project during the Riot Ensemble’s 2017 Call for Scores, which received nearly 300 applications. An open workshop with the ensemble followed in September 2017, taking place at London’s Southbank as part of the Nordic Music Daysfestival. Six composers took part in total – Aaron, Georgia and Donghoon Shin based in the U.K, and Ansgar Beste, Marcella Lucatelli and Asta Hyvärinen from Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Each composer then had around six months to complete their new piece before meeting in Helsingborg, Sweden, for a concert of premieres by the Riot Ensemble, given as part of the Swedish Society of Composer’s centenary celebrations (#FST100) on 14thApril.

The concert was really successful and Aaron and Georgia’s pieces were very well received. Georgia’s pieceMaeshoweis based on the resonant frequencies of an ancient site on Orkney. The instruments approximate these ‘room modes’ in various ways, and are overlaid with sine tones at the exact frequencies. Aaron’s piece Kate Frankensteinlooked into his family’s history, using video projection, live and pre-recorded sound to explore the story of one of Jack the Ripper’s victims.

It was fantastic to have the opportunity to work with the brilliant Riot Ensemble, who were: Ausiàs Garrigos (clarinet), Andy Connington (trombone), David Royo (percussion), Fontane Liang (harp), Neil Georgeson (piano), Louise McMonagle (cello) and Aaron Holloway-Nahum (director). We thank them very much and hope to collaborate with them again in future, and with our new Scandinavian friends!

—Georgia Rodgers

 

Drs Lingas and Antonopoulos in Romania at the Iași Byzantine Music Festival

“Vasile Alecsandri” National Theatre

During the last weekend of September 2017 Alexander Lingas and Spyridon Antonopoulos joined their colleagues in the vocal ensemble Cappella Romana for the inaugural Iași Byzantine Music Festival. The group was invited to Romania to perform its new programme of chant for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross as celebrated in the medieval rite of Hagia Sophia, a product of its participation in the research project Icons of Sound based at Stanford University.  Held before a capacity audience in the “Vasile Alecsandri” National Theatre, the concert began with hymns in Arabic and Greek sung by the choir of the Hamatoura Monastery in Lebanon. Dr Lingas also joining esteemed colleagues in the field of Byzantine music as a member of the festival’s Scientific Committee, an academic and artistic advisory board.

A video of the complete performance is available here: https://doxologia.ro/evenimente/video-concert-extraordinar-de-muzica-psaltica-la-teatrul-national-din-iasi

Alexander Lingas directs Cappella Romana in Iasi

Spyridon Antonopoulos chants with Mark Powell and David Stutz

Dr Spyridon Antonopoulos leads Psaltikon ensemble on Scandinavian tour

Psaltikon in Copenhagen

Dr Spyridon Antonopoulos, Honorary Research Fellow at City, recently led the vocal ensemble Psaltikon on a three-concert tour in Scandinavia. Psaltikon, founded by Antonopoulos in 2010, is a Boston-based vocal ensemble specializing in Byzantine chant and the music of the Eastern Mediterranean. For this tour, Psaltikon was joined by City University Reader in Music, Dr Alexander Lingas, along with Antonopoulos and six other singers. Prior to the tour, Dr Antonopoulos and Dr Lingas each gave papers at a Symposium on Religious Poetry and Performance at Uppsala University.

The tour program, entitled “Evenings Lights in Miklagård”, refers to the Scandinavian Viking name for Constantinople, the center of the world in the ninth century, when Halfdan the Viking carved his name into the parapet of the upper floor in Hagia Sophia’s southern gallery. The program explored chants which Halfdan might have heard while he inscribed his runes into Hagia Sophia’s marble. Central to the program were two kontakia, melismatic chants (whose text was originally composed in the sixth or seventh century), inscribed in the Psaltikon, the Constantinopolitan chant book for virtuoso soloists (the complementary Asmatikon contained the choral repertories). The kontakia were transcribed from a fourteenth century by the renowned musicologist Dr Ioannis Arvanitis, while the rest of the program editions were prepared by Dr Antonopoulos.

The tour’s first venue was the famous anatomical theater of the Museum Gustavianum. The ensemble then sang a concert for an audience of over 100 at Sofia Kyrka in Stockholm, before embarking on a five hour train through the Swedish woodlands to Copenhagen, where they were treated to a tour of the collections at the Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, led by Dr Christian Troeslgård.

 

The MMB, founded in the 1930s at the University of Copenhagen, is one of the most important research institutes for Byzantine musicology. The tour closed with a concert in the beautiful acoustic of St. Thomas in the Frederiksburg neighborhood of Copenhagen.

Cappella Romana, the vocal ensemble founded and directed by City Reader in Music Alexander Lingas, offered the first North American festival dedicated to Estonian composer Arvo Pärt between 5 and 12 February, 2017 in Portland, Oregon, USA.  Dr Lingas himself presented a lecture and directed four events, two of which featured instrumentalists of Portland’s Third Angle New Music ensemble: ‘Odes of Repentance’, a programme of a cappella sacred works; the   Passio Domini nostril Jesu Christi secundum Ioannem by candlelight (with the participation of the choir of Lewis and Clark College); the Missa Syllabica sung within the context of a Roman Catholic mass; and a gala finale concert at Reed College featuring Pärt’s Te Deum alongside works by Sir James MacMillan, the late Sir John Tavener, and Thanos Mikroutsikos. The full programme book including essays by Dr Lingas is available here: http://www.cappellaromana.org/apfbook/

Many of the concerts were sold out and the festival generated considerable interest in the media. Here is a review from the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/arvo-pärt-festival-in-portland-oregon-exceeds-expectations_us_58a7712fe4b026a89a7a2ae2

‘Innovative and Thought-Provoking’: Russian Chant with the Seattle Symphony and Cappella Romana

Dr Alexander Lingas of City and the men of the American-based vocal ensemble Cappella Romana recently completed an innovative collaboration with the Seattle Symphony that highlighted the roots of Sergei Rachmaninov’s orchestral music in the sound world of Russian liturgical chant. For three successive days, Dr Lingas led the singers both in pre-concert lecture-demonstrations of Russian sacred music and in two short vocal works sung immediately before splendid performances of Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto and Second Symphony directed by SSO Principal Guest Conductor Thomas Dausgaard. The concerts were hailed by audiences and critics, with the Seattle Times describing the participation of Cappella Romana as ‘highly atmospheric’ and ‘an innovative and thought-provoking entry into Rachmaninov’s musical world’. Full reviews are available here:

http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/classical-music/review-seattle-symphony-and-audience-show-rachmaninov-the-love/

http://www.cityartsonline.com/articles/breathtaking-performances-dausgaard-and-melnikov

During this busy weekend Cappella Romana also presented performances in Seattle (at St James Roman Catholic Cathedral) and Portland, Oregon (at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral) of a full-length concert tracing ‘The Russian Chant Revival’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Full programme notes are available here:

http://www.cappellaromana.org/the-russian-chant-revival/

A video of Dr Lingas’s informal talk before the Portland concert is here:

https://www.facebook.com/cappellaromana/videos/vb.24074802555/10155153137072556/?type=2&theater

‘The world according to Bob’ features on BBC Radio 3

bob-gilmore-cropforoto_page_image

Bob Gilmore

A selection of music recorded by the BBC in the Music Department’s Performance Space will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Hear and Now’ programme on Saturday, 3rd September 2016, at 22.00 (GMT).

The recordings were made during The world according to Bob, a two-day sequence of concerts and talks, hosted by the Music Department, celebrating the life, work, and ideas of the influential musicologist Bob Gilmore.

The programme includes a performance by Ian Pace of Horațiu Rădulescu’s Piano Sonata No. 2.

Full details of the programme can be found at the ‘Hear and Now’ website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07rkv2y.

 

Dr Diana Salazar wins International Computer Music Award

DianaSalazarDr Diana Salazar, Lecturer in Music, has been awarded the International Computer Music Association Regional Award for Europe 2015. Dr Salazar was awarded the prize for her 5.1 fixed media work ‘Rewind [Modus Operandi]’. The work was selected for performance at this year’s International Computer Music Conference in Texas last month, and a stereo version of the work will be released later this year on a CD publication featuring selected works from this year’s conference. The work will also be performed in the Bernaola Festival in Spain in November.

Gramophone names Passion Week an August Editor’s Choice

The latest recording by City Reader in Music Alexander Lingas and his US-based ensemble Cappella Romana has been named an Editor’s Choicesteinberg_passion_week in the August issue of Gramophone, which features a rave review of the disc by Malcolm Riley:

This important and exciting release from the Portland, Oregon-based 26-strong chamber choir is a notable successor to their ‘Good Friday in Jerusalem’ disc (5/15). Under their inspiring director Alexander Lingas they turn their attention to a recently rediscovered choral gem, the 47-minute long Passion Week by the Lithuanian-born composer Maximilian Steinberg (1883-1946). 

… The a cappella textures spread variously and luxuriantly into 12 parts, requiring, as might be expected, the sopranos to soar with jewel-like brilliance and the basses to delve to their reedy subterranean depths. Cappella Romana cope with all of this with an eloquent brilliance, singing with tremendous relish, as though this obscure masterpiece had been in their repertory for years. Their unanimity of attack and fastidious approach to dynamic contrasts are just two hallmarks of an outstanding achievement. Hats off, too, to Preston Smith and Steve Barnett for their superb engineering and production. …the finest advocacy from these fine musicians. This is definitely a disc to savour. 

Read the full review here.

Laudan Nooshin Presents Keynote Paper in Norway

On 10th June 2015, Laudan Nooshin presented an invited keynote paper at a conference in Norway organised by the Grieg Research School in Interdisciplinary Music Studies and held on the beautiful island of Stord. The conference was hosted jointly with the Norwegian Research School in Teacher Education and the theme was ‘The Art and Science of Improvisation’. Laudan’s keynote, which was entitled ‘Re-Imagining Musical Difference: Creative Process, Alterity and “Improvisation” in Iranian Music from Classical to Jazz’, explored the ways in which the concept of ‘improvisation’ has come to be understood, constructed and imagined by musicians in Iran over the past half century or so.

There were about 150 delegates at the conference, including a number of PhD music students from the UK. Other keynote speakers included Colin Lee, Professor of Music Therapy at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, who completed his PhD in Music Therapy at City University London in 1992.

The Grieg Research School is a collaboration between the University of Bergen, Bergen University College, Stord/Haugesund University College, Volda University College and the University of Stavanger. It hosts two conferences each year which bring together PhD students in a range of music disciplines, including music education, ethnomusicology, music therapy, musicology, performance and composition. Students have an opportunity to get feedback on their work and each conference includes a number of invited keynote speakers.

http://prosjektsider.hsh.no/r15/

http://prosjektsider.hsh.no/r15/2014/12/17/dr-laudan-nooshin/

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Laudan Nooshin presents Keynote

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Conference Venue

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View from the boat …