The last couple of weeks have been busy. There was a funeral at which the music included Stanford’s Blue Bird, performed at the end as the coffin was carried out. I did the solo in this and hadn’t encountered it at a funeral before, or indeed at any time of year other than the summer. But it didn’t seem out of place.
I returned to hear the Boyan Ensemble of Kiev perform a mixture of sacred and secular music. I admired their stamina, not only in doing a tour with a performance almost every night, but also in performing a concert programme without instrumental music to give the singers a rest. It was interesting to hear, for example, counter-tenor singing Ukrainian style, but I think I preferred the sacred music in the first half of the concert. The folk-songs in the second part were a bit over-arranged for my taste – it almost had me wishing for some John Rutter. The church pieces were more sober, though less melancholy than such music often is because they were themed around the Easter season.
For All Souls’ day we performed the Requiem setting by Charpentier, new to me, but then as I’ve said before much of this composer is under-performed. This sets a rather unusual selection of texts from the Requiem Mass, with a De Profundis for good measure. As with other music I’ve done by this composer, the notes are not hard but the pitch is consistently high.
An account of the Erleigh Cantors’ visit to Wells will follow.