No, I wasn’t back in New York, and strictly speaking it took place just off Second Avenue in Oldfield Park.
The introduction to Charpentier’s Te Deum is very well known to me from countless weddings and as the call signal for France Musique, but I’d never come across the rest of the piece. Much of Charpentier’s soprano writing tends to lie in an awkward part of my voice and when this is coupled with thin French vowels it becomes tricky for me to sing. The Latin got considerably modified – it wasn’t enough to try to sound like a francophone announcer on a Eurostar train – with some consonants omitted and some unvoiced ones become voiced.
Saint-Saëns’ Christmas Oratorio may not be a masterpiece, but at least it is possible to sing it with fervour. I think he must have realised that the work was in danger of being too anodyne; in the middle there is for no apparent reason a highly dramatic chorus of Quare fremuerunt gentes?, complete with a thunking top B flat for the sopranos, then it goes back to plaster-Madonna mode again.
The third part of the concert was a sequence of music associated with John Inwood, to whose memory the performance was dedicated. His taste must have been similar to mine in some ways, as it included parts of Tallis’ Lamentations, Rachmaninov’s Vespers and Victoria’s Requiem. Another new language for me: Estonian, in a performance of a piece by Kreek.