Gloucester Choral Society sang the same programme everywhere on our choir tour of Transylvania. Three blocks of choral music interspersed with organ pieces. (Except that in the castle we gave a cut-down unaccompanied programme twice with different singers each time.)
What is it about Stanford’s Coelos ascendit hodie and foreign choir tours? Years ago, some people I knew sang at an audience with Pope John Paul II and chose the very end of this piece to perform for him. We did it on Bristol Choral Society’s Latvia tour (spending a considerable amount of time teaching it to the choir) and it turned up on both this Gloucester Choral tour and the last one, rather more seasonally as they were in Ascensiontide.
Ascension, Sinaia Monastery
Another piece which I associate with choir tours in these parts is Bach’s motet Lobet den Herrn. We took it on tour to Hungary with my college choir, the strangest performance being given to some pleased but bewildered holidaymakers in a hotel TV lounge by Lake Balaton. This time it formed the single longest piece on our programme. One of the difficulties with performing Lobet to people who don’t know it is stopping premature applause before the final Alleluia – not a problem JSB would have had in church.
There were no pieces on this tour that were totally new to me. We started with a group of Tudor English anthems, then a whistle-stop tour round Europe with Locus iste, Brahms’ Geistliches Lied, Grieg’s Ave maris stella, Bogoroditse Dyevo by Rachmaninov and ending with the Bach. Our closing set was the Stanford, Parry’s My soul there is a country and ending with a couple of ‘bangers’ in the shape of his I was glad and the Hallelujah Chorus.