Rochester was a Cathedral I sang in early on, and in fact I think it may have been the first Cathedral the Erleigh Cantors ever went to. Certainly it was one of my earliest excursions with them. And neither the choir nor I had been back since.
The coat of arms of my College can be seen (its founder is buried here)
Our programme was dominated by one piece: Tallis’ Mass Puer natus est nobis. This is a piece I’d wondered about for a while, and now I found out why I’d never sung any of it: it’s on a huge scale and for seven voices. The notes are not too hard but the test is keeping concentration going over the long span of each movement (less of a problem for the tenors who have a cantus firmus). In the end we omitted the Benedictus as we felt Gloria, Sanctus and Agnus Dei were plenty long enough.
We decided to honour Stanford’s anniversary with a couple of less familiar pieces. Our Communion motet was his Latin 8-part Pater Noster and the canticles at Sunday evensong were his early setting in E flat. The canticles are tuneful enough although there are passages where you feel he was running out of time and had to finish the piece in a hurry by writing some unison bits, and the second soprano part has the limited-range tendency normally associated with alto lines.
Other music included Rachmaninov’s Nunc Dimittis (in English) and the Magnificat by Charles Theodore Pachelbel, son of the more famous composer, slave-owner and organiser of the first public concerts known to have taken place in New York and in Charleston. I took one of the solo parts in the Magnificat. We went for some big-name composers; as well as Rachmaninov, there was Walton (Drop drop slow tears) and Beethoven’s Alleluia again. Also Weelkes’ Gloria in Excelsis Deo and McKie’s (something of a one-piece composer, this) We wait for Thy loving-kindness.
Rochester Cathedral is not as much of a crowd-puller as some, but it has a venerable history, sizeable congregations at our services (albeit with a deanery pilgrimage from Woolwich on the Saturday) and an interesting selection of Cathedral gifts: I passed on the Rochester gin (only because I had enough to carry) but took some local cooking apples home with me. My visit also inspired me to do some research into my family history from the area.