Rather on the spur of the moment I decided to join a singing day at Gloucester Cathedral, organised by Gloucester Choral Society and featuring four settings of the Evening Canticles. It was a rare chance to sing this repertoire with the Cathedral’s own musical team. We were all able to fit into the choir stalls and surrounding stalls so we were singing them in the authentic place too! What of course wasn’t as it would be in a service was the number of singers, although it did lend quite a bit of extra oomph to Dyson in D in particular. Gibbons ‘Short’ was sung from an unfamiliar edition, just to keep me alert. For a second time I had the experience of singing Howells’ ‘Gloucester’ canticles in the location for which they were written, although I gather the organ sounds rather different from the one Howells wrote for, since a rebuild.
Thus far the music was all very familiar to me, but we gave the first performance of a new setting by Kerensa Briggs which we all had to learn from scratch. It would have been slightly easier to learn without the sudden change of key signature from six flats to five sharps at one point. But I found bits of it running through my head in the days afterwards, which is always a good sign.