The now annual ‘Party in the City’ which opens the Bath ‘MusicFest’ (as it is currently styled) booked the Chandos Singers to perform in the garden behind the Royal Crescent Hotel. We were the last performers at this venue and it was getting distinctly cold by the end. Still, we had an audience throughout, and they weren’t all guests at the hotel or friends and family of the performers, as a family I know turned up unsolicited!
We performed a mixture of unaccompanied pieces from various periods. I won’t go through them all, just single out a few. The Chandos ‘signature tune’ is En Hiver by Hindemith, a setting of Rilke which frequently gets trotted out when the choir does a set somewhere. Among the sacred pieces we performed were two new composers for me: Pierre de la Rue (represented by his Ave Maria) and Waller Goodworth’s setting of Ut queant laxis. Our final number was ‘Elibama’ by Stephen Hatfield, a mixture of Madagascan and Yiddish (!) melodies written for the Amabile Youth Singers. If you do crosswords and Scrabble, you’ll have worked out how the piece gets its name. (‘A-ma-bi-leh’ is also worked into the nonsense syllables at various points). Perhaps we should have renamed it ‘Sodnach’.