We returned from our dumb day (in our case, a first visit to the Isle of Wight) to the second half of the Portsmouth week. This had delighted the script/diacritical mark nerd in me (I update the choir’s website) as I had to typeset both Pēteris Vasks and Богородице Дѣво. The Vasks is one of two anthems I have come across to set words by Mother Teresa; we were permitted to use piano accompaniment as originally written. I sang one of the soprano verse parts in Daniel Purcell’s canticles in E minor, something I’d long had my eye on (I did the other when I was a student).
The Rachmaninov really is ‘the piece of the pandemic’ as since it started I have sung it with four different choirs. It was paired with Watson in E which was more familiar to me than to most others (a standard setting when I was a student). On Sunday morning our Mass setting was new to me – the Missa Brevis by Neil Cox. A piece that I’d be happy to sing again, although it was not hard to tell that the Gloria was written at a different time and for a choir of different ability than the other movements we sang. Our grand finale was Dyson in D and Jonathan Dove’s Seek Him that maketh the seven stars.
We paid special attention to psalms during the week, the highlight being word-painting of Ps. 102 on the Friday.
I had not performed indoors without a mask on for 18 months and it was a relief that everything still worked and I could leave with a real feeling of accomplishment.