the view from choir 8

I’ve written before about singing in Spem in Alium, I admit partly to see if it resulted in an invitation to sing the work in Tallis’ anniversary year of 2005. But I had to wait until now, with a performance by Chorus Angelorum conducted by Gavin Carr in front of a capacity and appreciative audience in Bath Abbey. One previous performance was at a wedding, and as I left for the concert I was telephoned out of the blue by the mother of the bride on that occasion, which I took to be a good omen!

I hadn’t sung in choir 8 before, but it is quite a good vantage point to be in, with plenty of time to prepare for your first entry. It also didn’t matter so much that my score just had choirs 7 and 8 in (with the other parts in an annotated reduction), since I was only adjacent to choir 7. On the other hand, the limited amount of space in Bath Abbey put me very near the front row of the audience! The choirs had to stand very close together, and rather than colour-code all eight of them, they alternated between singers in black and in white tops.

The other vocal pieces were four pieces of sacred music by Byrd (including I will not leave you comfortless, which I didn’t know before), and five songs by Dowland. The challenge for these last was making them sound as if sung by a small group, and getting to grips with the intricate words.

The concert also included the Bath Phil (like the Music Festival, they’ve got a shortened name now), conducted by Jason Thornton, performing Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro and Britten’s Lachrymae. The Britten used the theme from one of the Dowland songs we sang, and if you knew the song you could recognise fragments of the melody throughout. The grand finale was Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. The choir sang the theme beforehand with hymnal words, then quietly slipped round behind the orchestra (standing in the quire of the Abbey) and sang it again wordlessly in one of its early appearances in the piece.

There was a review in the Bath Chronicle.

I was in another concert two days later, and will write about it soon.

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