The Cathedral Chamber Choir’s Low Sunday weekend in Cambridge was a nostalgia trip for some of us, and was divided between two venues. On Saturday we were in Queens’ College Chapel, where we were left to our own devices to sing Bairstow’s Blessed City and Walmisley in D minor. The characterful organ is still at old Philharmonic pitch. Getting to sing in a College Chapel outside of term (unless there is a strong connexion such as being the choir of a College living) is not easy and it probably helped that our conductor had been organ scholar at Queens’.
I had had a bad cough for several days and on Sunday, when we were due to sing Matins and Evensong at Great St Mary’s, I woke feeling sure that I would have to desert the choir and sit in the congregation. However, when actually called upon to sing, enough voice came back, and where I found the top A in Ireland’s Greater Love I’ll never know. In the morning we sang canticles which were new to me: Francis Jackson’s Benedicite, which has the relatively rare combination of being quick to learn but musically interesting, and a Jubilate by Britten in E flat. The latter was not published in the composer’s lifetime, which is a pity as it’s rather better than the usual one in C; it was written around the same time as AMDG, which was also left unpublished.
I sang at Great St Mary’s a couple of times when I was a student. In those days the tradition of a Sunday evening service built around an address by a distinguished visiting preacher lingered on, and my College choir was asked to sing an anthem (we chose Wood’s O Thou the Central Orb) at the start of one such service. We were free to go straight afterwards, but we timed our exit too late, and the entire choir made a dash for it after the speaker had begun his sermon, feeling very embarrassed afterwards. Corpus also rose high enough in the choral rankings to be asked to sing the Advent Carol Service there one year.
This time, our choir got a free tower tour including the ringing chamber. I was able to verify that spikes now ensure that the greatest exploits of Whipplesnaith at King’s couldn’t now be repeated, and made do with singing Howells’ Coll. Reg. evening canticles instead.
We were fortunate in our organists: Nick Morris and Doug Tang.