Priory Voices (4): Durham

Firstly, apologies for some downtime over the last few days. The air conditioning in the room in which this server lives is faulty and the server had to be switched off during the Bank Holiday weekend in case it or other computers overheated when there was no one around to notice.

The final outing of the year for Priory Voices was to Durham Cathedral, not one to be missed. I found little had changed since I last came, though the Cathedral has done a major about-turn in the matter of candles in recent years. There are now two large banks of votive lights prominently located on each side of the nave; it’s not very long since the only candles in the building were at the tomb of St. Bede! I appreciated the opportunity for visitors to wander round the building well into the evening; no locking up immediately after Evensong, as happens at some places. It is not a hugely resonant acoustic – I think the heavy columns in the nave soak up a lot of sound – but a strong choir can persuade the echo to come out and play.
There was quite a lot of new music for me this weekend. Most excitingly, it was my first opportunity to sing Purcell’s anthem Jehovah, quam multi sunt hostes mei, which I was smitten by on hearing it for the first time on an evensong broadcast some ten years ago. Ever since then, I’ve longed to sing it, but it’s not often done, perhaps because of the deep bass (written for Gostling?) and tricky tenor solos (don’t know who Purcell’s tricky tenor was). The choral parts are for five voices, giving added richness and the opportunity for some stunning dissonances (e.g. the ‘-gunt’ of ‘insurgunt’ in the second phrase), which some recordings are rather coy about. I regard it as one of the masterpieces of the cathedral repertoire, though the Latin text has led some to conjecture that it was written for Catholic or even secular performance. I don’t get asked to do as much Purcell as I’d like, perhaps because many of his anthems are long and it isn’t easy to get hold of sets of copies.
We also sang Bryan Kelly’s Jamaican Canticles, new to me. I prefer them to the better-known Kelly in C, though I think they lose some of their lightness when re-arranged for SATB from the original treble voices only. (I have an LP of Reading Phoenix Choir singing another choral work by Bryan Kelly, ‘Linda’, which begins ‘Linda went out in her wedges’ and culminates with the moral ‘Promises break like biscuits’. I need hardly add that this was commissioned for the opening of the Reading Hexagon in the 1970’s). Incidentally, I noticed on the back cover of Kelly’s canticles that the publisher also has on its list an arrangement by Stephen Cleobury of the hymn tune ‘MacCabeus’, as if the hero of Handel’s oratorio had hailed from Scotland!
Other than that, there was another chance to sing Vierne’s Messe Solennelle at Romanesque columns as at Gloucester, and another shot at Howells’ ‘Coll. Reg.’ morning canticles, which I felt more secure about this time. We did my favourite Responses, the Lloyd second set, which was a case of coals to Newcastle as they were written for Durham. I enjoyed being able to sing the full complement of psalmody on the Saturday, and I even got some psalm chants which I didn’t know (and which weren’t home-grown), something which rarely happens these days.