Portsmouth pointing: 1

Finally I got to sing my first choral evensong in 18 months. The Cathedral Chamber Choir was in residence at Portsmouth Cathedral (rearranged from Salisbury) for a week, many of us staying in Rees Hall towards Southsea. It’s a very long time since I sang here, my previous visit being a service with the Erleigh Cantors not long after they were founded.

Our programme mixed music from various periods, with some pieces new to me and/or the choir. Dealing with the first half of the week: I had never before sung Robert Walker’s As the Apple Tree. This uses an aleatoric technique popular in the 1980s; the singers are at one point invited to sing set notes freely in any speed/rhythm they like, being brought in individually and all ending together. This sort of device seems to derive from the War Requiem, but never really caught on in church music, despite the efforts of Jonathan Harvey et al. It’s still being used elsewhere – I most recently encountered it in the new Judith Weir piece I recorded last year.

As we were getting used to singing as a group, and indeed to singing close to other people, most of the rest was familiar at least to me, though I had not sung Tomkins ‘Fifth’ Service for a while, and had only done Matthew Martin’s Te Lucis ante Terminum once before. As with the Walker, a setting I actually prefer to the normal setting of the same words.

We spaced ourselves out at readers holding a pair of singers, with the precentor and congregation the far side of a kind of bulkhead affair in the middle of the Cathedral that holds up the tower. A benefit of a dispersed congregation was that the service was livestreamed and then available on the Cathedral’s Facebook page.

Part 2 to follow.

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