On Saturday the Cathedral Chamber Choir paid its first visit to Westminster Cathedral, to sing at the Saturday evening Mass. Most Roman Catholic Cathedrals in England don’t go in for visiting choirs the way that Anglican ones do, and it was the first time I’d sung a service in one of them (although I have sung at Catholic Masses many times both here and abroad).
We sang some movements from Victoria’s Mass Simile est regnum cælorum, and the first part of Guerrero’s motet Veni, amica mea. The second Agnus Dei of the Mass uses two choirs in canon with one another, while the Guerrero weaves lines around a cantus firmus in the second soprano part (for this reason I made sure I was singing first soprano!). I would have loved to have been able to hear the choir as well as sing in it, both because it was difficult to get a feel for how it sounded in the body of the church, and in order to get the proper effect of the Guerrero setting. The choir sits in the apse, behind the high altar, where it was possible to get a view of the (large) congregation but where you inevitably feel a bit cut off from the rest of the building.
Our conductor this time was Matthew O’Donovan, who is the only person I know of to have conducted a BBC choral evensong broadcast while still an undergraduate (he also conducted the Duruflé I wrote about in my last posting). He made us sing scrambled up so that no one was next to anyone singing the same part. I enjoy doing this, and one choir I was once in, the Cambridge Chamber Group, did it routinely: most memorably when we performed all six Bach motets this way over two concerts in one weekend. Even when I’m not singing in this formation, I often try to be on the edge of a part so I can hear what others are doing (easier, the smaller the choir is).