I hadn’t come across this Latin verb before, but it turned up in the text of A solis ortus cardine. We sang a ‘standard’ selection of verses at various points during the Advent carol service. (I am relieved it wasn’t the entire hymn, as it runs to 23 verses, each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet.)
Other pieces included Lloyd’s Advent Prose (rejected by one cathedral choir as too difficult for them!), Rejoice in the Lord Alway attributed to Redford, Virga Jesse by Bruckner and O magnum mysterium by Victoria.
The previous day I went over to St. George’s Bristol to hear a friend premiering a flute concerto by Maurice Wright, as part of a gala concert. (Now what makes a concert a gala concert? Is it that it is in honour of a particular person – Rostropovich in this case – or event? Or is it a way of bundling up various diverse pieces of music into a single progamme?) Anyway, I was glad to get an opportunity to get to know Bruch’s Kol Nidre better. But I’m not so keen on Beethoven’s 2nd piano concerto. There is one very striking moment – the dramatic shift of style and quality in the first movement cadenza, as the unremarkable music heard so far gives way to middle-period Beethoven, and you suddenly realise what the composer was going on to achieve. Similarly the tuneful finale was also written later than the rest (I heard the original finale on R3 a few days later and again there’s no mistaking the improvement).