Some of us in the Erleigh Cantors felt that Tourism Australia should have sponsored our concert at St. Peter’s Earley, because of its potential for subliminal advertising. One piece we performed was Bob Chilcott’s setting of the Ave Maris Stella from his Salisbury Vespers, and on our practice recording the repeated phrase ‘sea most radiant’ came out sounding like ‘See Australia’.
We exploited the opportunity to deploy singers around the church in this piece and even more so in another Marian anthem, John Tavener’s Annunciation, where the solo quartet were in a small gallery off on one side of the west end of the church. For their final appearance they moved deeper into the gallery for a more distant effect. I just had a D to sing in this piece; our third Marian piece, Holst’s Ave Maria, was more demanding.
Our programme began with three Tudor pieces, including two rarities. I think I’ve only sung Weelkes’ O Lord, arise once before, with this choir, perhaps because it’s not very obvious what season the words would be suitable for. And it’s in lots of parts. And Morley’s Out of the deep is a real rarity, in that I’ve recorded it but not performed it! The recording was when I was a student, and we had a tenor soloist; this time the soloist was an alto.
Vaughan Williams’ Three Choral Hymns were new to me. Written for a festival choir, they are really quite hard work because they demand a lot of continuous sustained singing. They have some tricky key changes too – the transition from minor to major in a couple of them isn’t so obvious when the ‘minor’ is really modal. Alongside this we performed Holst’s This have I done for my true love. The more I look at the words of this, the more intriguing they are. They can’t have been composed by some illiterate yokel – consider the ABAB rhyme scheme and the various Latin-derived words which rhyme with ‘dance’. But they must have gone through a period of oral transmission before reaching Sandys’ collection, during which this rhyme scheme has been lost in a few of the verses. Is there any evidence they are Cornish, as the score asserts?
Our final piece was John Rutter’s sequence of spiritual arrangements Feel the Spirit, which we did with piano accompaniment. I felt the most successful numbers here were where Rutter allowed his own voice to show through (as in the solo part in Deep River) rather than pretending he was in New Orleans or Alabama. I’m pretty certain some of the words (for example ‘Hallelujah brothers, hallelujah sisters, Hear the music going round and around’) were added by Rutter himself, but if they are traditional I’m willing to be corrected. These were in the finale, O when the Saints, which I once had the pleasure of singing under the baton of Rutter himself when he took a choral workshop in Manchester.