Truro was one of the first Cathedrals that I performed in, but that was a one-off: a concert I sang on tour with the Exon Singers. I’d never sung a service there until I returned with the Cathedral Chamber Choir to sing in part of the choir’s annual Cathedral week.
I feel quite at home in the building as the Clayton and Bell stained glass is from the same workshop as that in my home church. The music list for the latter part of the week was predominantly 20th century, with two 21st-century pieces that were new to me by Matthew Martin – his Responses and Jubilate; also those quirky stalwarts, Kelly in C and Rubbra in A flat, and the classic Let all mortal flesh by Bairstow and Let all the world by Vaughan Williams. From the 19th century we had Brahms’ Geistliches Lied.
As before on our August week we got the acrostic hymn for St. Bartholomew. Just what is ‘Rapt in their apostolate’ supposed to mean? Presumably ‘glad to be an apostle’. I wonder whether JAL Riley got the idea from seeing the end of the Tantum Ergo, whose last two lines begin EW, and took it from there?
Our Mass setting was Mozart’s Missa Brevis K192, in which I sang some of the solo part in the Gloria. Our conductor auditions for solos; I wasn’t sure about this when he started doing it, but have been won over. It has the following advantages: prospective soloists get a chance to show what they can do; if you want to rule yourself out of consideration for some reason, you don’t put yourself forward; and the conductor gets to hear what people actually sound like singing the solo lines or together in a quartet, rather than having to imagine it.