I don’t normally have much of a ‘close season’ for singing. Erleigh Cantors at the end of July are followed by Cathedral Chamber Choir towards the end of August, and then church choir and Bristol Choral resume in the first week of September. But this year there has felt like a gap, of nearly a month after the Prom. During that time I spent 2 weeks in the USA which didn’t really yield any suitable material for this blog, and I didn’t join the Cathedral Chamber Choir in Lincoln. Perhaps also the Prom was a very definite end to the season as it was the last BBC National Orchestra of Wales Prom too.
The season began with Christ Church Bath on tour, something we only do occasionally. We were singing Evensong in the Stogumber Festival, in a village now ministered to by one of our former assistant clergy as part of a benefice lying largely on the West Somerset Railway. Shades of the Exultate Singers in Dunkerton as we delved into a remote corner of the county down some almost impossible roads. It would have been nice to have seen the village in better weather. We sang Stanford in B flat and Howells’ Hymn to St Cecilia to a decent-sized and appreciative congregation.
The season starts rather quietly as I’m not singing in the next Bristol Choral Society concert, but it continues with another visit to Wells (my third sing there of the year), followed by Mahler 2 (a first for me) and another first at Christmas: Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols which I’ve somehow managed to miss singing until now. But that’s some way off.