I spent last weekend singing with the Cathedral Chamber Choir in High Bradfield Parish Church and Sheffield Cathedral. (Don’t follow these links if your connexion is slow). High Bradfield was arranged for us by the Sheffield people because the Cathedral turned out to be unavailable on the Saturday. We sang evensong to members of the Prayer Book Society, including a new piece for me, Arvo Pärt’s Littlemore Tractus, which one of our number had sung on an Evensong broadcast not long ago. It’s some years since I sang any Pärt and his Magnificat is on my wishlist. This particular piece had a noticeable mediæval influence in its organ part.
On Sunday we sang in the Cathedral itself and there was another new piece for me in the morning service: Palestrina’s Missa Dies Sanctificatus. I prefer Victoria’s music to Palestrina’s (which I find rather bland), and to judge by what I’m asked to sing the people I sing for feel the same way, as it’s a while since I’ve sung one of his Mass settings. I got back into the style easily enough, though I had consciously not to force the music into the four-beat bars the edition had imposed on it, in order to feel comfortable with the rhythms. The service ended with a short ceremony in one of the Cathedral’s car parks, before it becomes the site for a new Cathedral visitors’ centre. I’m not sure what would be appropriate music for this, but what we sang was Bruckner’s Locus iste. Sheffield Cathedral is a pleasant building to sing in, though its pipe organ has been out of action since 1998.
Until Tuesday I had intended to sing Sunday evensong as well. This would have involved leaving the service slightly early in order to catch the last possible cross-country train (going via London was impossible because there were no through trains from Sheffield to London and more engineering work near Bath). But then even that train was replaced by a bus south of Birmingham and it was impossible to get from Sheffield to anywhere near Bath at a sensible time. As others were similarly hampered by the lack of trains it was a reduced choir that sang the evensong.
Now that I have sung in Sheffield there are only four C of E Cathedrals in England I have yet to perform in: Bradford, Birmingham, Leicester and Wakefield. I have no definite plans at the moment for any of these.
Sent to me from a review of a choral concert in the Ely Standard: ‘Finzi’s God is Gone upended the concert’. An anthem for Nietzsche, perhaps?