(Title adapted from Last Orders by Graham Swift.)
October’s weekend with the Erleigh Cantors was my first visit to Canterbury for a while. I have mixed memories of the previous one – with an under-prepared choir on what turned out to be my last weekend with them.
As usual at Canterbury there were restrictions on rehearsal time, this time to enable The Sixteen to rehearse for a Canterbury Festival concert on the Saturday evening. The consequences being an extended lunch break for us on the Saturday and enforced unaccompanied repertoire as our organist had not had a chance to set things up. So it was a case of reaching for that non-Tudor unaccompanied staple, Naylor in A, for the canticles, and Gabrieli’s 8-voice Jubilate Deo for the anthem, and Paul Spicer’s setting of the Responses.
An unusual use for a scroll of plainchant (Canterbury Cathedral cloister)
There was more double-choir repertoire at the Eucharist, when we sang a mass by Gabrieli’s pupil Hassler, together with an Ave Maria motet by my lost twin Rihards Dubra, both new pieces to me. We saved the big sings for Sunday evensong: Wesley in E and Elgar’s Give unto the Lord. I really am in danger of getting Elgared-out this year.
The Cathedral, one of the warmer ones on previous visits, had risked not putting the heating on (the only other unheated October weekend I can remember was at Ely, where it is never turned on until mid-November).
A pleasant surprise was the knowledgeable regular congregation. Instead of the usual well-meaning but naïve questions along the lines of ‘I suppose you’ve been rehearsing every week for some months?’ we were told ‘Our own choir doesn’t do that Mass setting or Ave Maria!’ Actually the congregations were all very large, swelled by visitors from the diocese and from further afield.
We’ll stay in Kent for our next Cathedral, Rochester, which I have not sung in since the very early days of the Erleigh Cantors.