The Epiphany carol service with Bath Abbey Chamber Choir has become a fixture and included a surprising number of pieces I hadn’t sung before, as well as a couple of standard ones for the season.
John Bull’s ‘Star Anthem’ was apparently once very popular but I’d never even heard of it, or realised that he wrote choral music. It contains one cadence which sounded startlingly archaic to my ears. I took one of the verse parts.
Lassus’ Omnes de Saba and Jacopus de Wert’s Vox in Rama were not pieces I’d sung before (nor in the latter case had I sung anything else by the composer). Moving into more recent compositions, I had heard Carl Rütti’s setting of I wonder as I wander many times on Christmas Eve broadcasts from King’s but never sung it, or anything else by him, and it proved reassuringly straightforward as long as you don’t listen too hard to the organ part.
Back in December I sang in a couple of other services in the Abbey, amongst other things reprising Howells in G and renewing my acquaintance with Philip Ledger’s setting of Adam lay y-bounden.