I returned to St. Alban’s Cathedral rather sooner than expected, on the weekend of Low Sunday with the Peterborough Chamber Choir. I sang two evensongs, dashing off after the first one to a photoshoot followed by a College dinner in Cambridge. Both evensongs featured long Magnificats (the congregation were given a spoken dispensation to sit down). On the Saturday we sang the setting by Arvo Pärt, which I had long wanted to do. Now I’ll probably get to do it with lots of other groups.
On Sunday our Magnificat was the setting in B flat for double choir by Stanford. This always brings back memories of staring at the stained-glass windows in King’s College Chapel, trying to work out what the biblical stories in them were. I used to go to evensong there sometimes on Fridays, when they used unaccompanied settings to give their organ scholar a night off. This one seemed to crop up a great deal, in the days when no one else performed it very much. We did it rather faster than I’m used to, but otherwise it can be interminable!
Our Nuncs were Naylor in A and the Geoffrey Burgon setting. I hadn’t sung the latter before – it is one of few pieces of church music that I still associate with a TV series. Usually such associations are weak for me and easily broken.
Sunday was a big sing because we also did the Howells responses. At least I did not repeat the mistake I made in the 3rd Amen last time I sang 2nd soprano in these (it was one of the rare occasions when I really couldn’t find my note, rather than just being careless). The Pärt wasn’t the only new piece for me as we sang some responses by McPhee (very rarely done it seems) and a setting of Exultate Deo by Hendrik Andriessen, the first piece by him that I’d performed.
This is a bit of a digression from your main theme, but while we’re on the subject of identifying the stories in stained-glass windows; have you ever come across a key for the scenes in the east window of Bath Abbey? The Bath Abbey web-site mentions that there are 56 of them, but gives no futher details.
Apologies if I’ve asked you this before; I’ve had no luck when I enquired at the Abbey.
Robin
Yes, I’ve looked at them quite a lot during services too! They tell the Gospel story, balanced by a potted Old Testament at the West end. I could look and see if there’s a guide to them in the bookshop. Or I sing with one of their lay readers from time to time and I could ask him.
The stained glass in the Abbey is pretty variable – the 19th-century East and West windows are among the best of it. I find it sad (but not very surprising) that when fragments from the bombed clerestory windows were reset in the North aisle after the war, they rescued and displayed the coats of arms of various local families, but nothing of any religious significance.