These words qualified the title of the Erleigh Cantors’ May concert in St Peter’s Earley, the usual mix of pieces from our Cathedral weekends with some other repertoire.
Last year we did some of the obvious royal pieces because of the Platinum Jubilee. This time round we went for the Restoration/Georgian period: Blow’s God is our Hope and Strength, Boyce’s The King shall Rejoice (with a top B, a rarity for this period; the first part was sung at the recent Coronation) and William Child’s O Lord, grant the King a long life. This opened the second part of the concert.
A Marian sequence began with Josquin’s Ave Maria. I’d never done all of this, only the simple homophonic section. It continued with Poulenc’s Salve Regina and Mendelssohn’s Ave Maria. I had the 2nd soprano verse part in this last, which is a surprisingly expansive setting for a Protestant composer.
The first part concluded with Bach’s motet Der Geist hilft, which I have not sung since I did all six motets (in one weekend, and with voices scrambled!) as a student. I didn’t remember it all that well at first but found that it came back as I rehearsed it.
Our last two official pieces were Aston’s Alleluia Psallat and another new piece for me, the ‘Hallelujah chorus’ which closes Beethoven’s Christ on the Mount of Olives. A rather cheerful chorus for a work which ends as Jesus is about to be betrayed. We sang Holst’s Nunc Dimittis as an encore.
Interludes were provided by our usual reader Merry Evans, organist Christopher Cipkin and Ben de Souza on the concert accordion, an instrument I knew little about (it’s big in Russia).
We had a good-sized audience of Eurovision refugees and raised nearly £1500 for two good causes.