Last weekend I was performing on my home territory with Bath Baroque. The first half of the programme was all-Handel, with a new piece to me, the Birthday Ode for Queen Anne, which was very enjoyable as long as you didn’t pay too much attention to the words! We also sang the Hallelujah Chorus.
The major part of the second half was the Missa Scala Aretina by Francisco Valls, sometime organist of Barcelona Cathedral, new to all of us. For this we were divided into three four-part choirs, which averaged out at about two to a part. My yardstick for Baroque masses is not the Mass in B minor (that would be unfair!) but something like Cavalli’s Messa Concertata, a work which has featured in some of the most boring evenings of my singing and concert-going life. The Missa Scala Aretina was certainly an improvement on that, with some lively rhythms and melodies (though I’m not sure that the ‘Crucifixus’ was quite the place for one of the bouncier examples of this). Furthermore, the small numbers gave plenty of responsibility to individual singers, and we didn’t use soloists so I wasn’t stuck too much of the time on an A – or rather G since baroque pitch here meant down a tone. Valls had a great liking for the so-called English cadence, and according to the programme note got into trouble for using an unprepared dissonance in the Gloria, though the passage in question seems pretty tame now. The concert ended with a couple of South American carols we’d done in earlier programmes.
The weather probably put a dent in our audience and it was further diminished when some left during a heavy snow shower in the interval, presumably fearing that their journey home was at risk. Among those who stayed, however, was a reviewer from the Bath Chronicle, and the text of a favourable review has been put on the Exultate Singers’ website.