I went to most of the Choral Evensongs at the Three Choirs Festival. These of course are the real Three Choirs – the Cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford – and it’s clear that for many festival-goers the evensongs are the heart of the Festival experience. The queues started forming an hour before the services began; many in them appeared to be Dutch (English church music is currently very popular in the Netherlands and I’m occasionally invited on weekends to sing it there).
Saturday evensong was sung by the Festival’s Youth Choir, singing Stanford in A and Macmillan’s A New Song. This was not as well attended as the others, which was a shame as it was very good. Monday was a Howells-fest with responses, chant, St Paul’s Service and Like as the hart. On Tuesday it was the turn of S S Wesley and I mentally revisited a recording I once made with Christ’s College chapel choir, Cambridge, when I heard the evening Canticles in E and Ascribe unto the Lord (I was one of those singing the verse on the recording). For responses, though, we did not get the ones carved out of the Morning Service in E by Donald Hunt.
Wednesday was the broadcast. I joined the queue rather than using the artists’ entrance for this one, and only just secured a seat in the quire. In fact my original seat was unsatisfactory, as it was next to someone who’d been smoking a lot of cigars. I didn’t like the thought of what an hour and a half of breathing that in might do to my chances of singing Berlioz well that evening, and moved to a seat in the back row of the quire. This turned out to have a good view of Adrian Partington conducting those parts of the service where the congregation were standing, so I could observe a different repertoire of gestures from the ones he uses when conducting a chorus, and sing in time in the hymns (listening on iPlayer I’m pleased to hear the congregation making a goodly sound – there must have been a fair few of the chorus in it). The canticles were a new setting by Ian King which sounded pretty demanding, with frequent changes of time signature. Yet another big sing for the anthem, For lo I raise up by Stanford.
On Friday I heard David Bednall’s Gloria ‘completion’ of Finzi’s Magnificat, and his Nunc Dimittis written as a companion canticle. The Gloria uses material from the rest of the Magnificat and that is fine as far as it goes, but I’ve sung the Magnificat in several Cathedrals without anyone being bothered that it lacked a Gloria. Finzi never returned to the piece and put one in, I felt that adding one breaks up the transition from the dramatic and significant ‘Abraham and his seed for ever’ to the quietly reflective ‘Amen’. The Nunc complemented it well, but it is another big and loud setting, and I suspect singing the two canticles together would be hard work for a choir. So the anthem was relatively brief: Hadley’s My beloved spake.
The choirs for all these services were large ones, hence the predominance of expansive pieces and the lack of earlier repertoire.