The song room at Christchurch Priory must have one of the nicest views of all: across to the inlet of the river Stour where there is a marina full of yachts. I’d never been to the Priory (or indeed the town) when the Cathedral Chamber Choir showed up for a weekend of services.
In amongst more standard repertoire were some pieces I hadn’t done before. I have heard Philip Moore’s Responses countless times on broadcasts but this was the first time I’d sung them and I found them harder than I expected to. A particular difficulty was sorting out crotchets and dotted crotchets in the Lord’s Prayer. Our only ‘early’ piece was the motet O quam suavis by Vivanco. And I hadn’t previously sung Matthew Martin’s Te lucis ante terminum which was nevertheless a fairly straightforward piece to begin the weekend with.
Our communion setting was Darke in E, some of which we sing in Bath, though not the Gloria which has some very exposed soprano lines. Matins had just one canticle, in our case Britten’s Jubilate in E flat. Our parting shot was Stanford’s For lo I raise up, which we’d been deprived of the chance to sing on our last choir tour. We put a lot of work into making this as good as we could achieve; it helped that evensong was late on the Sunday so rehearsal time wasn’t rushed.
It is an interesting building though not hugely resonant – the Durham-like thick Norman pillars see to that. I wonder what the Kaiser made of the service he attended there? I was sorry that all services were in the nave so we never used the historic quire. However, I’m not sure we’d have fitted in to the stalls, or having done so left room for a congregation there, and also a number of the misericords are fragile and in need of restoration. The clergy were much more musically aware than they are in many parish churches (even some ‘major churches’), and the organ sounds lovely after a recent rebuild. (Our organist explored its range of colours during his hymn accompaniments.) Christchurch Priory seems to be off the radar of many visiting choirs but is well worth considering.