For many years I’ve followed Radio 3’s Choral Evensong broadcasts, and have listened to them whenever possible. I’d never been to one – why bother when Radio 3 brings it into your own home? But I made a special case for the recent broadcast from Merton College, Oxford, where I was once a student and sang in the choir.
The service was a mixture of old (Victoria O quam gloriosum, and Smith responses) conducted by Peter Philips and new(er) (Howells in G and Vaughan Williams’ Valiant-for-Truth) conducted by Ben Nicholas. I also appreciated having the full psalms for the day. The choir weren’t in their usual stalls, but a little further west, nearer the organ, and arranged in a U formation across the chapel, with microphones at the apex. This had the effect of drastically cutting back on the resonance of the Chapel, both in the building and on air.
I was very impressed with the standard, which didn’t seem to me to have the common college choir problem of relatively weak tenors and basses (though I learn from a message board that there was some back-row reinforcement on the day). Tuning, blend, ensemble seemed to come together effortlessly and the service flowed in a calm and reverent way without lengthy descriptions of the venue or pointless descants. I have only two minor criticisms. One is that the service ran for only 50 minutes and there would have been time for an office hymn as well as the one at the end. Also, I thought that the choir was slightly out with the organ at one point in the Nunc Dimittis; I would lay the blame for this largely on the instrument, which is badly located and scheduled for replacement. When I was a student it had no CCTV, just a mirror and we hardly ever used it for accompanying anthems or canticles (when we did canticle settings, that is!)
After the service I was a guest at the launch party for the choir’s new CD. Here I was able to mix with some members of the choir and other guests, and fortunately the conversation was mostly about music, rather than about my job, or my interlocutor’s in-laws, or some other less interesting topic.
I learned more about how the choir works these days. It appears that most of those who aren’t choral scholars aren’t Mertonians. This contrasts with what I found in Cambridge, where I once auditioned for one of the better chapel choirs and was told that I would have been good enough if I’d been a member of the College, but that they required a higher standard from people outside! But it does also recall the Merton choir as it was when I came up, which included a large proportion of non-Mertonians; I think this was largely a hangover from the time when the College did not admit women but had a mixed choir, so it had to take women from elsewhere. Current members of the choir also got to hear from me about what the choir was like when I sang in it, and were duly appalled that we only sang a proper Mag and Nunc setting once a year!