I believe I visited Ross-on-Wye many years ago but since then it’s been just a placename on road signs in Gloucester. I seized an opportunity to commemorate William Byrd’s anniversary by performing the Mag and Nunc from the Great Service at a special evensong in the parish church there with an ‘all comers’ choir (I think my invitation came via the Three Choirs Festival Chorus). I’d never sung these in a service despite being offered the chance to sing them twice in one month with different choirs a few years ago.
This ‘Byrd’ just behind me kept me on the straight and narrow!
The church has recently replaced pews with chairs and are clearly proud of the ability to reorganise space that they now have, so we sat in a large circle (more of an oval, really) in the nave with the conductor near the organ console. A gain in a sense of singing to one another, but an added layer of difficulty in (for example) singing a duet with someone on the far side who could be a long way away! I had expressed a willingness to take on a verse part, and sang the Choir 1 treble ones in the Magnificat.
People are sometimes a bit sniffy about the Great Service and say Byrd’s heart wasn’t really in it because it was written for the Church of England. I regard the Tudor verse canticle setting as one of those formats that can’t be improved, and maintain that the Great Service is one of the finest examples – particularly where voices interweave in the verse sections – even if it doesn’t match the perfection that is the Gibbons 2nd Service. The notes are not particularly hard – the difficulty is maintaining the concentration over such a large span.
But that wasn’t the only music by Byrd in the service; we also sang his Responses and O Lord make thy servant with text adapted for the new King. (I never sang it in a service during the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth.) They missed a trick as the psalm chant could have been one of the one Richard Marlow adapted from music by Byrd. The church is, surprisingly for its size, not very resonant, perhaps because the west end under the tower has been closed off.
There is enthusiasm to repeat the event and though I don’t think I’ll be able to be at the proposed evensong for Weelkes in the autumn, I’d love to explore, say, some of the large-scale verse anthems by Purcell, which are rather out of favour generally at the moment.