For the second year in a row the Chamber Choir sang at the Abbey on Ash Wednesday. We opened with Purcell Remember not, Lord, used Byrd’s Four-Part mass as the setting, and during the Ashing sang Lotti’s setting of the Miserere, which I’d not come across before. It is a through-composed setting of the entire text, all very much on a level and not modulating far, so that you can stop at the end of any verse with no worse consequences than being in a different but closely related key to the one in which you started. Everyone in the congregation was ashed (very thoroughly) by about two-thirds of the way through, so that’s how much we sang.
For the second Sunday in Lent we sang choral evensong, with the Weelkes short service (like Byrd’s, I’ve sung this far less often than Gibbons Short) and a work I’d never done in a service: Byrd’s diptych of Ne irascaris and Civitas sancti tui. This last had long been on my wishlist, after I’d heard it many times on Lenten evensong broadcasts. I had sung Civitas sancti tui on its own, informally, at a Chantry Singers reunion event. So, what about that accidental in bar 96, eh? Editions and performers are split about this one, but we did it.