The Erleigh Cantors arrived at Guildford Cathedral at 8.30 a.m. and we finally left about 7.45 in the evening after singing three services (with a couple of free hours in the afternoon).
This event featured music by a number of famous composers. Our Mass setting was Haydn’s Little Organ Mass, at Mattins we sang Vaughan Williams Te Deum in G and the evensong anthem was Bach’s Lobet den Herrn. I hadn’t sung any of the Bach motets for a while, but this one was thoroughly drilled into me in my Cambridge days, so no danger of singing a B flat for a B natural or any similar mistake. More of a challenge was keeping both sides and the organ together in such a broad space.
I’d never sung Poulenc’s Salve Regina before, though it wasn’t hard to learn as it was full of his characteristic turns of phrase. Like the Schütz motet we sang from the same book a few months ago, it reserves its highest note for the final phrase (at least in my part). Not quite a new piece, but I had not sung Blitheman’s In pace for a very long time, probably not since my early student days.
The Erleigh Cantors have done a lot of Kenneth Leighton, but rather surprisingly until now neither of his canticle settings. We used the first ‘Magdalen College’ set at Evensong. Other twentieth-century repertoire was the Sumsion responses and And I saw a new heaven by Bainton.
Evensong was the first time I’d sung at Guildford with the lights on, which enabled me to appreciate the changing patterns on the cloth which hangs behind the altar. A Canon of Guildford is about to move to our church, so she should feel at home with our liturgically-themed lighting!