On Saturday I sang at a wedding at church. The main thing the choir was needed for was the choral part of the Lohengrin wedding march. When I do this I am always amused that the words make it pretty clear that the march is into a bedroom, not a church!
Brides and grooms will happily spend lots of money (all right, about 10% of the cost of the wedding dress) on a choir and then waste them by making them sing mostly in unison (3 out 4 hymns at this wedding). They also rarely supply them with an order of service each so that they can be sure what to sing when and indeed sing the same words as the congregation (you can be sure that the words in the church’s hymn book will differ from those on the sheet). Our wedding avoided these pitfalls.
Meanwhile I’ve had to decline an invitation to sing evensong at Bath Abbey with the choir of the village where I grew up, which is visiting. I wrote below that I hoped it would be a long time before I was asked to sing the Balfour Gardiner again; in fact it was all of a week as that’s what they’re doing.