The Abbey Chamber Choir got to sing two services in Holy Week. As last year, we provided the music for the afternoon service on Palm Sunday, but this time it was a straightforward evensong. Somehow Ernest Bullock’s canticles in D have passed me by; I have certainly heard other people sing them but had never done them myself until now. The Responses by our conductor Adam Field were less surprisingly also new to me, being only a few years old. (Worth checking out if you are looking for a 4-part setting that won’t take long to learn.)
The highlight though for me was the first part of Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah, including that monotone. Some other sopranos in the choir complained about it, but it’s like that lightbulb joke; you hold onto the note and the rest of the choir revolves around you. And you do get your highest note right at the end before everyone else has to wait for you to place the third of the final chord and leave it floating there. I have never performed the second part of the Lamentations although I have sung it through; the words need a trigger warning if you understand Latin.
On Maundy Thursday we struck a slightly more cheerful note with Grayston Ives’ Missa Brevis (in which I sang the soprano solo part in the Gloria) and as in 2024 the motets were Duruflé’s Ubi Caritas and de Séverac’s Tantum Ergo.
Good Friday at Christ Church was mostly familiar pieces that we sing at this service such as Christus factus est by Bruckner, Tučapský’s Pater meus and Ireland’s Greater Love, but there was something new to me: Morley’s Funeral Sentences.