Henley at the Abbey

I went to hear the choir of St. Mary’s, Henley, sing evensong at Bath Abbey on Saturday (their conductor is the usual organist for the Erleigh Cantors); it was the first time I’d been to hear a visiting choir since before the summer. Although the Abbey doesn’t inform you what the canticle setting is going to be at these services, I can usually tell when a choir is about to burst into Stanford in C by their faces as they gear themselves up for the opening entry. This service was no exception! The anthem was ‘And I saw a new heaven’.
The hymn, unfortunately, was ‘The day thou gavest’. I hope this doesn’t mark a return to the days a few years ago when this hymn was chosen by visiting choirs at about half of these Saturday services, regardless of the liturgical season. No one ever considered how boring it got for anyone who went to Saturday evensongs regularly! In a service where the congregational participation is just Creed, prayers and hymn (and sometimes at Bath Abbey the collective contribution to the prayers is confined to a solitary ‘Amen’ – not even the Grace), you need some variety in the choice of a hymn for them to sing!

I hope to get to rather more of these services over the next few months, and encourage others to do the same. Especially if you like singing ‘The day thou gavest’ or listening to Murill in E, which seems to be the favourite setting of visiting choirs. The best of these choirs can be very good, and they often bring music which isn’t in the repertoire of the Abbey’s own choirs. As it happens, last Saturday’s service was well attended (and not just by people who’d come from Henley with their choir), but sometimes they aren’t, or the people the choir bring with them aren’t familiar with evensong and would feel more at ease if there were others around who were. The Saturday evensongs aren’t routinely publicised on the website or in ‘Abbey News’ as they used to be, but there’s always a notice up outside the NW door on the day if there is one, and they are mentioned in the weekly pew sheet given out the previous Sunday.