In past years, there has been a broadcast of a Passiontide service from St. John’s College, Cambridge on Radio 3. I was delighted to find that the College has made this year’s service available as an audiocast:
http://www.sjcchoir.co.uk/
I was even happier to find two of my favourite anthems (Gesualdo’s O vos omnes and Purcell’s Jehova, quam multi), about which I’ve raved elsewhere in this blog, are included, along with music by Howells, Stainer, Harvey, Gibbons, Poulenc and Anerio.
The audiocast is in MP3 format, and further audiocasts are promised over the next few months. I shall certainly be listening to them.
More Purcell on Radio 3’s day of English music yesterday. The lunchtime programme about him rather underplayed his church music (perhaps because the presenter is an expert on his secular solo song). However, he reappeared in the programme of English anthems in the evening’s edition of The Choir. But My Beloved Spake and the ‘Bell Anthem’ are not one and the same – this confusion should really have been spotted by the presenter or an editor before the broadcast went out. Ouch!
Now they put up one webcast a week in term time, with an introduction by a member of the choir saying what’s been going on and introducing the music. Well worth a listen.