A late-night series of trains got me to Cambridge from Reading a little after midnight, ready for my godson’s confirmation in King’s College Chapel on the Sunday morning, part of a group from King’s College School.
The presiding Bishop was that of Leicester (a late replacement for the Bishop of Lincoln) and the music was Lennox Berkeley’s Missa Brevis and Messiaen’s O sacrum convivium, both in my repertoire. You don’t seem to hear so much of Berkeley’s music these days. (We didn’t sing any of his compositions at Merton, even though that was his College; some enterprising contemporaries of mine went to interview him for the College magazine. Probably because we couldn’t easily sing anything with the organ in Merton Chapel.)
This will be the last time I hear Stephen Cleobury conducting King’s College Choir and I was able to catch him at the end of the service and exchange a few words. It will be interesting to see how the inevitable comparisons with St John’s change under his successor.
When I was a graduate student I tended to attend services at King’s rather than St John’s, perhaps drawn by the architecture. (I find St John’s College Chapel a faintly irritating building, possibly because it is a 19th-century copy of Merton.) Although I am not a huge admirer of the stained glass in King’s, there was always plenty of detail to look at while you listened to Stanford’s Latin Magnificat in B flat (which was what the choir seemed to sing at least half the times I went). This time I found myself admiring a particularly vivid depiction of Jonah and the whale.