the heaviest peal of eight

I’m told these are the bells at Sherborne Abbey*, which may explain why all the weekends on offer for the visit of the Cathedral Chamber Choir also had a visiting team of ringers doing a lengthy peal on the Saturday. Since my previous visit the organ has been rebuilt and a new west window installed, but otherwise it was much as I remembered.

We brought some relatively unusual repertoire, which I gather was appreciated by the congregation. Grayston Ives’ Missa Brevis was written for New College Oxford and proved to have its tricky moments with some exposed entries. I’d never come across it before. Our motets were Byrd’s Ave Verum corpus (no. 4000 on my spreadsheet of things I’ve sung) and Scio enim by Lassus, the latter also new to me and with some startling harmonic shifts and another exposed entry (sopranos come in at the beginning on a top G). In fact I’ve sung surprisingly little Lassus.

Our evensong partnered music by William Lloyd Webber and Leighton, with the former’s Sing the Life and Most glorious Lord of Life and the lattter’s Second Service and responses. I think I prefer the Second Service to the First, but I get asked to sing it less often.

We sang just the two Sunday services, but the Abbey encouraged us to include a generous amount of music, with both Kyrie and Gloria at the Eucharist, two motets, and an introit at Evensong.

There’s a video here.

* It’s the heaviest set of 8 bells usable for change-ringing worldwide, and 9th heaviest overall. See here.