The following weekend I had another concert, Bristol Choral Society’s Christmas concert in Bristol Cathedral. A chance to complete the set of Coronation Anthems by Handel, as we did all except The King shall Rejoice, which I sang in May this year. This was something of a memory test for me, as I had not sung two of them since I was a student, in a rather short-lived choir conducted by John Butt. This still put me at an advantage over most in the choir who had not done them at all!
They require a lot of stamina and energy, not just to project the overall bright celebratory mood, but also in the more reflective passages, such as one bar in My heart is inditing which is at a much greater level of difficulty than anything else in the anthems. (Sopranos who’ve sung the anthems will know which bar I’m talking about.)
If they need some singers next May, we know the anthems now and improved on the original performance (if the notes made by the then Archbishop of Canterbury are to be believed: ‘the Anthem in Confusion: All irregular in the Music’).
The other half of the programme was Vivaldi’s Gloria, the subject of our Come and Sing earlier in the autumn. I learn from the programme that it wasn’t published till the 1920s – you tend to assume that such a popular piece now has been known about since at least the mid-nineteenth century when baroque music began to be performed again.
Another concert where it was good to be back with an orchestra (the British Sinfonietta). We had a sizeable audience who were generous with their applause.