So apparently Benjamin Britten once died, and to prove it the BBC is making a docu-drama about his final decade. Well, it is the centenary, after all, and the English sure do love him. It’s taken most of the art out of guessing what Oxford ensembles might programme over the course of 2013.

Actually, it turns out that some of Britten’s lesser-known choral music is pretty extraordinary. This livens things up no end if you happen to sing with Schola Cantorum of Oxford (as I do, having unaccountably passed the audition back in October). Schola has collaborated with the BBC several times recently on composer profile pieces, and we duly fronted up to the chapel at St Peter’s College – which is also our usual rehearsal space – on 11 February. Our task: to be filmed singing three Britten numbers while not stuffing up too badly or accidentally looking into a camera. Upon arrival, it was a bit like the first five minutes of a Doctor Who episode – all frosted blue light and dry ice, with unknown backlit entities lumbering through the murkiness from time to time. Sadly, we weren’t permitted to pretend to land a TARDIS, nor even to enjoy the novelty for long, and were shunted across a freezing quad to a prosaic holding room where equally prosaic tea-making facilities awaited. The object of this exercise was of course to encourage the British members of the choir (i.e. virtually everyone but me and one or two others) to achieve the most British possible mood immediately in advance of the shoot.

We warmed up with the evergreen (and very well-known) Hymn to the Virgin. Our configuration for this was one in which we’d never rehearsed it – wholly scrambled (that is, not in parts), then rearranged for height-related aesthetic reasons, and with the solo quartet halfway down the chapel and facing back towards us. Unsurprisingly, it took numerous takes for the ensemble to settle – and Jamie Burton, Schola’s conductor, took a slowish tempo, drawing out some of the phrases far enough to make some genuine demands on our breath control. We were being encouraged to look up from our music even more than a good choir normally might, because it was more important to be telegenic than musical, which resulted in some mistakes (including from me) that forced some retakes and patching, at which point it turned out that it was all a lie, and actually it was more important to be musical than telegenic.

Having bagged Britten’s early classic with a relatively low rate of asphyxiation-related attrition, we repositioned for the second piece, and here my night began to go downhill. Canny manoeuvres from my fellow choristers resulted in my ending up at the very back left corner of the choir – unenviably close to a large and unsympathetic-looking camera. (The crew were all business, by the way – only one instance of forgetting to plug leads in, and some stellar work identifying a light bulb as not working and nearly tripping over a crate while aggressively wielding a handheld camera). Fretting about my left profile in this distressingly exposed position, I tried to do my bit as we embarked upon Rosa Mystica, from the Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam cycle.

This piece was already a tough enough sing: for basses, that’s largely due to the long, quiet passages that stay on the A below middle C in quick, irregular rhythms. The note is right on my break, and, having already spent one hour singing in A, I wasn’t relishing the thought of another. Imagine my woe, then, at the confluence of three further unfortunate events. First, the men were re-scrambled for height reasons, leaving me wholly walled in by tenors and unable to hear my fellow basses at all. In Rosa Mystica, that’s bad, because the tenors sing a different set of irregular rhythms to the basses, but concurrently with them, and on the same note. Secondly, my position on the wings and the centralised light meant that an exceptionally long and profound shadow was thrown across my music by the tenor in front, rendering it somewhat hard to read. Third, my natural response (to raise my folder) was completely prohibited by virtue of my placement at the extremity of a row – in fact, we unlucky bookends were repeatedly enjoined to keep our folders flat and horizontal at all times. Holding the folders according to prescription cast them further into shadow, making them completely useless.

I did not feel myself best placed to sing optimally in these conditions. (At least nobody was having a go at my hair, though – probably because it was beyond redemption). Rosa Mystica was, in fact, a complete nightmare. I got spooked about making mistakes prominent enough to force retakes, became hesitant, and missed more than one entry over the various patches. If any footage is used of me (and, across my obediently horizontal folder, of my row), I will surely be buggering something up, no matter how brief the shot. Naturally, I feel Britten would be proud.

Apparently, the last time Schola did this type of session, the chapel was so cold that the breath of all the singers was visible in the final cut. Such overt signs of the corporeal might well have befitted the night’s final number, which was A Death, the eighth, last and hardest piece from Britten’s very late and monstrously difficult cycle Sacred and Profane. The medieval English text bespeaks bodily decay in the most graphic fashion, before launching toward its manic conclusion: existential baggage speedily jettisoned, a final laugh in the face of fate. Sadly for me, the configuration was unchanged from Rosa Mystica – the only upside being that I more or less knew A Death from memory after weeks of panicked rehearsals on it. One of the cameramen took it upon himself to help me, this time, though. Deciding that it would be artful to shoot Jamie from behind the choir, through strategic gaps in the three rows of singers, he stationed himself directly behind my left shoulder, making me terrified to move at all. In all subsequent takes, an unexpected hand would occasionally snake under my arm and onto my music, ever pushing it down and down into depthless obscurity. I like to think that I bore it all in the most stoic British manner.

And thus the Schola-BBC Britten collaboration wore on, finishing, in the end, only 30 minutes behind schedule, and with universally acclaimed great success. The mood in much of the choir, particularly among those who’d undergone fewer tribulations during the evening than I, was pretty jubilant, and Jamie seemed very pleased. I may even watch the final film. Even if only to check my profile.