At this season the music I’m asked to sing tends to lighten up a bit. First up was Rossini’s Messe Solennelle with Bristol Choral Society – the first time I’d performed with them in Bristol Cathedral, so there was new routine to get used to. I’d owned a score of this piece for years – the Cambridge Chamber Group were going to do it and we all bought our scores at a discount from the Cambridge Music Shop, then the performance never happened. This was my first chance to perform it since then.
It resembles his Stabat Mater in that the chorus parts are pretty straightforward, except that Rossini felt a need to put in a fugue, or in this case two, which consumed the lion’s share of rehearsal time. There is also one of the longest waits I know of for chorus while we enjoy listening to the soloists.
A week later there was a wedding at church, the first I’ve sung there. We sang Rutter’s For the beauty of the earth, which is not as easy as it might sound because it has syncopated rhythms which must be snappy, and the inevitable Jesu, joy of Man’s desiring. The words of this really are twaddle and don’t translate the German of Bach’s cantata (no Lutheran would write anything that vacuous). Nor did Bach make the mistake of setting two verses one after the other – in the cantata they are separate movements. This hardly matters as we sang it into the backs of the heads of the wedding party who were signing the register on the altar, and who doubtless were not paying attention to the words.