On the Friday night of our visit to St David’s, many of the Erleigh Cantors went to hear the choir of University College, Durham give a recital of ’20th and 21st century music’ in the Cathedral. I was rather expecting this to be some of the anthems they’d sung while in residence at the Cathedral, but it did not overlap with their service music and was considerably ambitious; an almost wholly unaccompanied programme including Howells’ Requiem and MacMillan’s Christus vincit, amongst other things. It was all expertly performed, and I believe the choir has recently recorded several of the pieces.
One of us was a former member of this choir (quite a few years ago) and inevitably we compared this with the choirs of our own student days. It would seem that as in Cambridge and (even more) Oxford, the calibre of College choirs has also gone up significantly in Durham – a sign that music is belatedly recognised as a worthwhile achievement on a par with sport? I would suggest that the expertise of available women has gone up because there are now potentially former girl choristers to choose from, but the men were just as good.