It is a long time since I’ve been to St Edmundsbury Cathedral. In the meantime it’s sprouted a tower, accommodated a visitor centre and joined the trend for installing lifts (rather better integrated with the building than York Minster’s). It is an attractive building with a supportive acoustic in the quire, some beautiful wrought iron and a gallery in the North transept from which we sang Bairstow’s Let all Mortal Flesh.
The Erleigh Cantors came for the weekend with a stack of music including something very high on my list of wanted works: Frank Martin’s Mass for double choir, from which we sang all but the Kyrie and Credo. It is a famously hard piece (I suspect many Cathedrals don’t have it in their repertoire). Part of the difficulty is that there is no other well-known music by this composer, so no familiar idiom to adjust to. Having said that, a couple of bars in the Sanctus really remind me of the same movement in Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G minor, although the settings were written in the same year and Martin’s was kept private for decades. Morphic resonance, anyone? Anyway, I have now learnt those movements so thoroughly that I could easily sing them again at short notice.
I associate this Cathedral with Mozart. Last time I came was to sing the Solemn Vespers, this time the Te Deum K141. As with the early Mozart masses where the Dona Nobis Pacem is as long as the rest of the work put together, the last few words take up a large proportion of the piece. Was this Salzburg Cathedral’s liturgical requirement? We paired it with another piece new to me, Peter Philips’ setting of the Jubilate Deo, a double-choir piece in the Venetian manner. Both of these (and Howells’ Coll Reg canticles, which we sang in the afternoon) have to be handled carefully, because they play on an awkward area where my voice changes.
We also sang Rutter’s Cantate Domino (new to me), Bob Chilcott’s Hail, Star of the Sea, the Francis Jackson Responses, William Child’s Evening Canticles in B flat, and an extract from Elijah (good practice for the 3 Choirs next summer).
Bury St Edmunds is a quiet sort of place. Especially on Sundays – neither the Cathedral refectory nor the newsagent nearby were open – but even on Saturday night our meal together ended after the main course at 8.30 p.m. By that time Priory Voices (meeting that weekend in Durham) probably hadn’t even finished pre-prandial drinks in the pub!
