A week on: another Requiem and another setting of Psalm 23. This was Gloucester Choral Society’s double-bill of Fauré and Stanford in Gloucester Cathedral.
I would have liked to have illustrated this post with another in the sequence of windows from the cloister, showing the Ascension. But there isn’t one! The sequence drawn from the Gospels/Acts jumps from the women at the tomb, to Paul on the road to Damascus. There are plain windows in between, as if they had intended to fill the gap, or some mishap befell the windows with Ascension, Pentecost etc.
This would have been to illustrate Caelos ascendit hodie, the central one of the Three Motets, which we performed in a sequence with some transposition to smooth awkward jumps of tonality between them. The text is an obscure one – an internet search just turned up references to Stanford – doubtless chosen for Trinity College because of the line Laudetur Sancta Trinitas.
Other Stanford pieces were that war-horse, the Te Deum in B flat, the aforementioned Psalm 23 setting and ending with the double-choir Magnificat in B flat. When I worked in Cambridge I would sometimes go to evensong at King’s at the end of the week, and because Friday was unaccompanied, as often as not this would be the setting. I’d sit there staring at the stained glass wondering just how much more of the piece there was! Our interpretation was rather livelier, certainly more so than any other I’ve given of this work (I may have been the only soprano at least who had performed it before).
The Fauré was accompanied by the organ, the last I’ll hear of it for a while as it’s being taken out of action for major work. I’ll get to sing it again in the autumn with Bristol Choral Society.