This blog proved its usefulness when a reader saw that I wanted to sing in Birmingham Cathedral and suggested that I join his choir (the Peterborough Chamber Choir) for a weekend of services there.
Evensong on the Saturday had a Russian theme. I had my work cut out to learn the words to Rachmaninov’s setting of the Magnificat, especially the line with three instances of the ‘pushchair’ sound. (Had the Russians ever taken over and rewritten our signs in Cyrillic, the one on Ashchurch railway station would have become much shorter). Rachmaninov set the Mag and Nunc texts, but rather carelessly neglected to write a setting of the responses for Anglican evensong, so one of the choir has done this for him by adapting bits of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. We sang his Praise the Lord from the Heavens as an introit. I have a strongly polarised attitude to Rachmaninov’s music which I should write about another time.
This choir goes in for mixing and matching settings by different composers, so at the Eucharist the Gloria was by Henry Smart, the Sanctus and Benedictus by Antony Milner and the Agnus Dei (in French) by Rupert Lang. At the final evensong we did Victoria’s Magnificat on the first tone for double choir, with a Nunc by Bax. All of these were new to me; I could see why I hadn’t sung the Victoria before, given the number of parts it requires. Yet another new piece was Anthony Piccolo’s setting of Jesus Christ the apple tree.
Birmingham was the first new cathedral for me since 2004. It leaves Wakefield, Bradford and Leicester as the only CofE Cathedrals in England I haven’t sung in.
‘[Rachmaninov] rather carelessly neglected to write a setting of the responses for Anglican evensong’. I did him a disservice in saying this; he wrote a beautiful setting of the opening versicle and response in the seventh movement of the ‘Vespers’.