In the second half of October, we embarked on our first US tour since 2005, performing across seven states and travelling across many more. This time more than any other before I was struck by the sheer scale and variety of the United States.
After landing in Chicago, we took a train south carving through Illinois and towns such as Normal and Springfield – Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace. This heavily delayed journey put even the UK’s troubled rail network in the shade, but passing lawns littered with oversized Hallowe’en decorations and the inevitable Trump/Vance and Harris/Walz banners had the effect of well and truly rooting us in time and space.
Arriving in St Louis five hours later you could be forgiven for feeling you’d travelled a long way. Until you look at a map. Fast forward to arriving in New York just over a week later, after the boundless space and sprawling towns of Texas and the South, the contrast was jarring. Adjusting to Manhattan’s bustling streets took me an afternoon of wandering and wondering when I was going to start enjoying this place I love so much. I needn’t have worried: a brisk walk down the Highline (rushing to a tour at the Tenement museum) and a wander around Chinatown quickly won me back round! Our performance space in New York offered a marked contrast from its mid-town surroundings. While just a couple of blocks away Times Square buzzes with lights and energy, St Mary’s church offers a dimly lit and incense-infused sanctuary beneath a dark blue ceiling decorated with stars.
The concert programme we performed was A Deer’s Cry – the Choral Pilgrimage from 2016 combining the works of Arvo Pärt and William Byrd. We are all so fond of this programme and it was a pleasure to see audiences enjoying it wherever we went. The appreciation of choral music from these audiences was clear, whether or not they were familiar with these particular composers and each concert had its own unique atmosphere. In Austin, TX where we were competing for attention with the US Grand Prix and a high profile college American football game, the simple school hall-like church was filled with families; in Dallas the well-heeled residents of the Highland Park district packed out the Neo-Gothic chapel with its pristine hammerbeam roof; and in Athens, Georgia, college students formed the core of the audience.
Acoustically, every space offered different musical opportunities, and we were able to ease ourselves in gently with our first performance in St Louis Basilica. Its five-second reverberation, adorned with over 40 million mosaic tiles offered the ideal space for Byrd’s polyphony and a great place to play with Pärt’s use of silence in his many characteristic bars’ rest. Even the three concert halls we performed in had their own distinct acoustic atmosphere. Athens University of Georgia’s Hugh Hodgson Hall had an open warmth which embraced the audience and performers together, the ETSU Martin Center had an immediate clarity on stage which was then magnified in the auditorium, and the vast 18th-Century Woolsey Hall at Yale added a grandeur and gravitas to our final afternoon performance.
Performing in university halls gives us the opportunity to work with students and share an insight into the English choral tradition through Q&A sessions. At the University of Georgia we welcomed choral and conducting students to our rehearsal, guiding them through some of the key moments of the programme; the palindromic Diliges Dominum and the many playful canons and different iterations of the themes in Tallis’s Miserere Nostri. At our final stop in Yale we took part in a workshop with student conductors, singing selected choruses from Handel’s Messiah while Harry coached their conducting technique.
As anyone following us on our social media will have observed, it was not all work and no play and the tour provided many opportunities to eat out together. Between us we sampled such local cuisines as BBQ in Texas, deep-dish pizza in Chicago, authentic New York Italian spaghetti and meatballs, and brisket and blackberry cobbler in Tennessee. The latter was right in the middle of the tour in Johnson City where the least known and perhaps least promising stop on the tour surprised us with the best scenery: eye-popping fall colours on a walk up into the Buffalo Mountain Range south of the city, and a wonderful evening spent all together enjoying barbecued meats, beer and cocktails. That day also happened to be my birthday, so perhaps I’m biased! For balance I’ll say that we also endured a five-hour long coach journey on that particular day so we really had earned that night out!
It’s definitely got easier to eat healthily in the US – I remember visiting ten years ago and desperately googling the nearest Whole Foods store to stock up in whichever town we happened to pitch up. The portion sizes are still enormous though and two weeks of constant eating out will take its toll! The diet starts at the bottom of this massive bag of caramel M&Ms… Harry’s daily quest for cold, fresh milk for his cup of tea became a running theme of the tour much to the amusement of more than one coffee-shop barista! We were looked after so beautifully at every venue with tea, coffee, fresh fruit and cookies, and often a light meal. These are the seemingly small gestures that make long tours manageable and enjoyable, and keep us coming back!
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Passing through towns decorated for Halloween on the journey from Chicago to St Louis
The glorious mosaic tiled interior of St Louis Basilica
The group at a brewery in Johnson City
Soprano Katy Hill exploring the Buffalo Mountain Range
Autumn leaves in Buffalo National Park