Sadly the weather prevented us from enjoying the St. Mary Magdalen chapel garden, which has one of the best views in Bath. Instead, the Chandos singers performed an unusual programme of music setting mostly Catholic texts, or at least texts by Catholic authors.
Rubbra’s Creature-songs to Heaven are a real rarity. They set four poems, translated by Rumer Godden, which imagine how a hen, a snail, a ladybird and a peacock might address God. They were written for a school choir which I imagine must have found them quite taxing because they are difficult, even with the help of a piano accompaniment (the accompaniment exists in various forms). I can see there are non-musical reasons why they have sunk, rather unfairly, almost without trace (an Internet search on the title turned up no performances other than our own!). They aren’t secular, but couldn’t be performed as part of the liturgy, and also Rubbra’s music is generally out of fashion now (apart from choirs going doggedly through his evening canticles in A flat).
I’d divide Britten’s music for unaccompanied choir, or choir+small forces, into two categories. There are the pieces that don’t require a very accomplished choir (of which I’d rate Rejoice in the Lamb as the hardest) and the ones that are really seriously hard (of which I’d rate the Hymn to St. Cecilia as the easiest). AMDG, an unaccompanied setting of seven poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is definitely in the latter camp. The set was never completed, which suggests that Britten himself was not happy with it, as I think he didn’t leave a trail of unfinished pieces behind him. I sense that he was somehow at odds with the words – perhaps this is most clear in his setting of The Soldier, which apparently praises a profession Britten would have deplored. Occasionally I got disconcerting echoes of other pieces Britten wrote around the same time, such as his Cabaret songs!
We sang two of Grieg’s ‘Psalms’ Op. 74, his last compositions, and characteristic of him in their rather modal turns of phrase, but now combined with daring harmonies.
Substantial pieces by Sweelinck (Ecce prandium meum) and Gabrieli (Jubilate Deo) completed the concert.