A perk of being in the Three Choirs Festival Chorus is that you can claim unsold seats for concerts in the Cathedral. Strictly speaking, these should be in the quire, in other words without a view, but when some of us went to the door just before this concert we got given some on the raised seats at the very back of the nave, with a lovely view all the way down compensating for the distance from the performers. Earlier on I’d caught up with some members of Stile Antico picnicing in the Close and had a chat to Matthew O’Donovan, whom I’ll be singing for later in the summer.
The programme itself took as its theme the transformation of secular material into sacred pieces, all beautifully performed with varying combinations of the twelve singers. The most recent works were four Monteverdi madrigals remodelled with religious texts by Coppini. I’d have appreciated these rather more if I’d been familiar with the madrigalian originals. And then there were such familiar melodies (even to a non-specialist such as me) as L’homme armé and The Western Wynde along with the Mass movements they inspired. I once sang Victoria’s Missa pro victoria and hadn’t appreciated it was a parody mass based on Jannequin’s La guerre which we heard (and saw acted out) first. And one of the texts used showed that Carmina Burana wasn’t the rudest thing to be sung in Gloucester Cathedral this week. Perhaps I should revive that idea of making the tone-row from Lulu into an Anglican chant – you can make almost anything into an Anglican chant if you’re determined enough.