The Cathedral Chamber Choir returned to Great St Mary’s Church in Cambridge, where our musical director is now based, this time combining it with evensong in Ely Cathedral.
Ely remained pleasantly unchanged (although I miss the poster of ground-plans of Cathedrals which used to hang in the song room). Our music combined the familiar (Bairstow’s Save us O Lord and Tomkins Responses) with dredging up memories of Noble in A minor, a setting I have only sung once before, many years ago when I was a student. I was pleased to be able to sing the full psalmody for the day.
Sunday was sung with a very different acoustic and organ (curiously, the University Church in Cambridge has two organs, one for University use and one for the parish; its Oxford equivalent has the same organ for everyone). Our Sunday morning setting was Berkeley’s Missa Brevis which I’d sung recently with the Erleigh Cantors, but as it was Lent we got to do the Kyrie which I’m not sure I’d ever done before. Our anthem was definitely new to me: Whitlock’s ‘Be still my soul’, which proved to have some rather unexpected twists in it.
At evensong, Dyson in F was dropped in favour of Moeran in D, another setting undisturbed since my student days and which was actually better than I remembered. We focused our rehearsal time on Finzi’s Welcome, sweet and sacred feast, which I have only ever sung with this choir. It was originally published alongside God is gone up and My lovely one and one might well ask why one never comes across My lovely one? Maybe it is too specific to weddings to fit into other services, but given that I’ve sung for a number of diehard Finzi fans, I’m surprised I haven’t sung it even in a concert, or even heard it.
Back to Welcome sweet and sacred feast – to me, it recalls his Magnificat in particular in places and there’s one passage which makes me wonder whether it inspired the hymn tune ‘Gonfalon Royal’. It was good to end the weekend with a large-scale but not standard work.
A personalised GSM drain cover