Plenty of these in the name of one of the composers in the most recent Chandos Singers concert: Grzegorz Gerwazy Gorczycki, whose Conductus (an assortment of settings of mostly funerary texts) we performed. The other substantial single piece was Lalande’s Super flumina Babilonis, an unexpurgated setting of this psalm. Not being a specialist in French baroque, I hadn’t sung any Lalande before, although our Charpentier at Christmas prompted me to go out and buy a recording, and to discover that Charpentier is surprisingly under-represented on the shelves of the local CD shop.
After Christmas I knew it would only be a matter of time before I sang Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque, and this opened the concert. Another piece I associate with the Exultate Singers is Ginastera’s Lamentations of Jeremiah, with which we opened the second half.
We ended with three anthems by Purcell. I see that people have come to this blog a few times recently by searching on Jehova quam multi sunt hostes mei and I’m proud to be associated in an indirect way with this stunning anthem. I’m not quite so enamoured of Blow up the Trumpet, which rather feels as if it has been put together out of lots of left-over bits of other anthems. And that’s not the only reason it doesn’t come round much; if Purcell would write a piece with three tenor parts, what did he expect? Our third Purcell anthem was the extended O Sing unto the Lord.