The first of my two November concerts was in Gloucester Cathedral and brought in a brass ensemble to accompany us as well as the organ.
The single largest piece was Joseph Jongen’s Mass of the Blessed Sacrament. Jongen is known to me (and then only rather dimly) as a composer of organ music, but was quite prolific as a choral composer. My hire copy of the Mass was well-thumbed from several performances, and OUP clearly thought it worthwhile to publish it.
As usual when singing a work by a composer I’d never performed before, I had to get used to their turns of phrase and favourite harmonic progressions. One part of the Mass, the setting of the words et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, had me racking my brains to locate the other piece it really reminded me of, until I identified it as a few bars from A Child of our Time. But in general Jongen was distinctive and varied enough to keep my interest.
The second part of the concert paid tribute to the Bruckner anniversary with Locus iste, Ave Maria and Ecce Sacerdos, the last bringing in our brass ensemble. The concert ended with a sequence of polychoral music by Giovanni Gabrieli, where the brass replaced some vocal lines. We started with that Erleigh Cantors standard Jubilate Deo, then the more sober Passiontide O Domine Jesu Christe and finally a strenuous setting of the opening of the Easter Exultet.
There was an experimental early start which had some advantages for me: easier to fill in time before the concert and enabling me to go there by train.