I rejoined the South Cotswold Big Sing Group in Gloucester Cathedral to sing a work that had been on my hitlist for a while, Berlioz’ Te Deum. I’d heard a lot about performances of this piece that others had sung in (one other singer proudly boasted it was her 10th!), but hadn’t even heard performances or recordings of it that I recall. Given the forces required this is not so surprising.
I went to a workshop and thereafter the choir accumulated more and more singers until performance day. (There was no equivalent of the objectionable singer who appeared in an equivalent concert a few years ago and found fault with almost everyone around him.)
This is grand, ceremonial music, something which was understood by the organisers of the 2000 Olympic opening ceremony in Sydney when an extract accompanied the final transfer of the flame at the climax of the ceremony. But just before that is the quieter, intimate setting of the words Sanctum quoque Paraclitum Spiritum for lower voices alone; the same effect simply couldn’t be achieved with upper voices at the same pitch. Surely Berlioz was one of the great composers for the ATB combination? (I suppose Byrd and Rachmaninov might have a word to say about this too.) And there are also some very exposed and awkward quiet entries.
It wasn’t the only piece on the programme. The tenors and basses sang the Alto Rhapsody in accompaniment to Dame Sarah Connolly and we sops and altos had Fauré’s and Messager’s Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville, a work written as a ‘benefit’ for the fishermen of the place where they’d gone on holiday. I was expecting this to be new to me, but on singing through I immediately realised that Fauré had redeployed some parts of it in his later Messe Basse, in some cases setting them to different texts. Messager’s contribution was a couple of movements in a rather more operatically-inflected though not conflicting style.
I had not sung the Messe Basse since I was at school, but it remains firmly engraved in my memory. We used to sing it at confirmation services along with Mozart’s Ave Verum and in my register of pieces that I’ve sung it is the first item.