The Bath Festival Chorus has re-formed this year, and on Monday I went to hear them with James MacMillan conducting music by himself and others.
Inevitably I found myself comparing the account of the Canticos Sagrados with the Exultate Singers’ performance I sang in last September. I started doing this even before the piece began – we had to get our opening notes from the organ part! Setting aside direct comparisons, I got to hear properly the interplay of different voices rather than concentrating on my own part. It became clearer how the long held notes I’d sung in the second and third movements supported the other voices.
I was less impressed by the Westminster Mass, but I was hearing a concert performance of extracts from a work that is really for liturgical use and perhaps works better in that setting.
The programme also included the Magnificat from Tippett’s St. John’s College setting (a setting I’d love to sing one day), a Bruckner motet, Britten’s Te Deum in E (which I’ve sung once, in York Minster), and Poulenc’s Litanies à la Vierge Noire (I would have liked some rather more French-sounding vowels here – there’s been no shortage of the language on Bath’s streets this last week, as it must be half-term on the other side of the Channel). But in general it was an impressively ambitious programme to bring off. From what I could see of MacMillan (his back) he appeared to conduct precisely and without extravagant gestures.
The Festival Chorus seems smaller than it used to be, which may be why it sometimes sounded thin in some voices. It’s the only choir of that size I know of which doesn’t have a web page as a means of advertising and recruitment! I still regret not accepting an offer to join some years back and I’ll now have to wait till the 2006 Festival.