On New Year’s Day/Jan 2nd I was singing Evensong in Westminster Abbey with the Cathedral Chamber Choir. Our programme for the first service was especially appealing to me: the Gibbons 2nd service and Gibbons’ anthem ‘See, see the Word is incarnate’, a piece I’d long been keen to sing. (I see that these pieces are also appearing on next week’s Radio 3 Choral Evensong broadcast). Gibbons is my favourite Tudor composer – there is an urgency and flamboyance about much of his music compared with that of his contemporaries. In fact I think the Second Service is my favourite set of canticles; there is so much variety in it with barely a change of tempo needed!
The OUP edition of the canticles we used is beginning to show its age (1930’s) in some ways, especially in its wariness of a discord in the Gloria to the Magnificat: ‘this note should be sung very lightly’. I suppose in the 19th century the dissonance would have been edited out altogether. But at least we were all using the same edition! For the anthem, the choir was using two different editions because of a shortage of copies and all the usual variations between them cropped up: different key, different pagination, different underlay, different barring, different distribution of music between voices and different expression and dynamic markings! This always eats up rehearsal time.
I attempted to visit two special (to me) places at the Abbey. Leading off the main cloister is a passage going to another, smaller cloister, and off this second cloister is another passage going to a garden which few of the thousands of visitors to the Abbey ever reach. It’s a pleasant place to spend an odd moment outside rehearsals, but I have never succeeded in working out its opening hours at this time of year. This time it was open on New Year’s Day but not on the Friday.
I also wanted to go and pay my respects at the monument to Purcell, in his old workplace, as he is one of my favourite composers. As the Abbey is a major tourist attraction, and in recent years has also become a waiting room for people about to catch Eurostar trains from Waterloo, visitors are constrained to follow a circuit in one direction round the building. As a member of a visiting choir you do not have to pay admission, but you still have to go with the flow once inside. The choir as a whole is also marshalled carefully about; for example, after evensong you are led back into the cloister, the door is shut behind you and you can’t re-enter the building to hear the organ voluntary! I have now discovered that Purcell’s monument is in the north choir aisle, but I didn’t find an opportunity to go and look at it. I’m not even sure that the north choir aisle is open apart from for a few minutes immediately before services, when as a member of the choir I can’t get to it because I’m lined up in the cloister waiting to process in.
I’ll hold over an account of the second Evensong till my next posting.