Good Friday brought a come-and-sing performance of Duruflé’s Requiem at St. Giles’s Church, Oxford. This work, with its irregular, fluid rhythms and frequent tempo changes, is anything but four-square, and so might not be an obvious candidate for a scratch performance on two hours’ rehearsal. However, the event attracted a rather higher calibre of singer than such events often do, and there was at least one person in each voice part who knew the work well enough to keep an eye on the conductor and give a lead. I had more or less recovered from a sore throat and cough which bothered me earlier in the week. And it was a chance to renew acquaintance with various people I hadn’t seen in a long time, or to meet others I’d heard about but not actually met, which made it worth the journey.
I own a vocal score, but as I didn’t want to take out a second mortgage it’s the edition with only the voice parts, not the organ, which is supplemented by a crib sheet for some of the less obvious leads (the blank three bars before the soprano entry at the beginning of the In Paradisum are especially unhelpful).
A performance of this piece in Manchester Cathedral at an All Souls’ Day eucharist was one of my favourite censer moments. As the trebles hit the top B flat in the Sanctus (the highest note of the piece) the thurifer swung the censer through the full 360 degrees. A rare chance for the altar party to show awareness of what the choir is doing!