@bristolchoral
I’ve been going round saying that our forthcoming Glagolitic Mass is the first in the Bath/Bristol area for at least 20 years. Then I started to wonder whether it was in fact the first ever.
Unless you have a recently composed or recently published work, it’s only possible to check this for large-scale works, and even then one can’t easily have full confidence that one hasn’t overlooked a performance. Some long-established choirs have potted histories on their website which might mention notable previous concerts. But then again they might not, and there are other ways a performance might not have left a trace on a web page: choirs that no longer exist (e.g. Brandon Hill Singers, Bath Festival Chorus), choirs one may not have thought of, choirs that were assembled for a particular performance (quite common round here), visiting orchestras which brought their own choir with them.
Actually collective memory will take you quite a long way back. If no one who’s been in the local choir scene for some decades can remember a performance of a major choral work, then chances are there hasn’t been one in that time. One local oracle did say that Richard Hickox wanted to do the Glagolitic Mass with the Bath Festival Chorus, but it never happened. (Some of our choir did however get to perform it under his direction in Cardiff.)
The Cambridge Music Handbook for the Mass describes early performances in Britain, leaving a window of some fifteen years or so when there might have been one in Bristol or Bath which has escaped my radar. Given that Janáček was not hugely popular in Britain at that time and the Mass really requires a professional orchestra, I’m willing to stand by my assertion that we have a local première on our hands. If this is used to publicise our performance, it can always be qualified by saying that this is believed to be the first one in the area.
(It is not, however, the first in SW England. I have turned up an account of a performance given by the Exmouth Choral Society about 20 years ago. Another possible local première I think is our performance of Verdi’s Quattro Pezzi Sacri last year.)