Bath Abbey Chamber Choir began the year with the fixed point in our annual schedule: the Epiphany Carol service, with two pieces I hadn’t done before.
Byrd’s 5-part setting of Reges Tharsis appears to be an early work, using the style of a previous generation, and has a certain amount of clunkiness, such as its abrupt ending, presumably resulting from inexperience.
Jonathan Dove’s The three kings is familiar to me from 9 Lessons and Carols broadcasts and proved to be tricky, with its changes of speed and key. I’d missed some rehearsal on it in December so I had catching up to do.
We reprised Marenzio’s Tribus miraculis from a couple of years ago, and also included the well-known The Crown of Roses by Tchaikovsky and the Coventry Carol. In the latter case we left in the dissonance recorded in the transcription which was fortunately made before the original manuscript was lost to a fire. Almost certainly this is a scribal error, but it seems right to my 21st-century ears, even if it’s wrong.
The other piece was another Nine Lessons favourite, Pearsall’s In dulci jubilo, which I hadn’t sung for a decade or so (it seems to have fallen out of favour in recent years, at least at King’s).