I am beginning to feel that at the moment something happens to drastically cut rehearsal time every time I have to sing some Howells. At Birmingham Cathedral it was a loss of power, at Canterbury Cathedral with Priory Voices it was that our rehearsal venue (All Saints chapel) was audible inside the building during a service.
This sort of occurrence has featured in just about all my visits to Canterbury (about five in all, though none within the lifetime of this blog), while being relatively rare in Cathedral visits in general. I recall on other occasions eating lunch at 3 p.m. because we could rehearse in the choir-stalls only at lunchtime, and having to climb over some iron railings because we’d been locked away from the mini-bus which was due to take us back to our lodgings. (These lodgings – which were not run by the Cathedral but were possibly on their list of places for choirs to stay! – were condemned as unfit for people to stay in not long afterwards.)
Canterbury is not the only Cathedral which no longer puts visiting choirs in its own song school, and this does create problems. Ideally the choir needs a room that is: soundproof from the main part of the building but convenient for access to it, equipped with a reasonable practice piano, large enough to accommodate the choir in a sensible rehearsal formation, not likely to be wandered into by the public and secure for leaving possessions in during the service. Even in a complex building with many spaces, such a place may not exist. I hope that the new visitors’ centre Canterbury is planning to build will include a rehearsal room for visiting choirs, if they can’t use the song school. (Exeter, Gloucester and Peterborough might also look into this!)
On a more positive note, we visited during the time when the nave is cleared of chairs, so the eucharist was in the quire and there was no need for the usual ‘build your own choir stalls’ on the steps at the east and of the nave.
So which was the Howells piece which lost out? It was the St Paul’s Service, which I rarely get to sing (Gloucester seems to be the favoured set of Howells canticles at the moment). A shame as it is my favourite among his settings, but it seems to have the reputation of being harder than the others. Perhaps this is because it does require a bit more stamina (being written for a very large acoustic) or because the parts are highly rhythmically independent of one another.
We paired this with Purcell’s Jehova, quam multi sunt hostes mei, for which we had appropriate soloists but again not a lot of rehearsal. Our organist (Paul Carr) was able to use the Cathedral’s chamber organ.
I won’t go through all the rest of the music, but it included Mozart’s Coronation Mass and a new piece to me, Alma redemptoris mater by Palestrina. We didn’t have time in the end during communion for ‘King John of Portugal’s’ Crux Fidelis. The composer of this, whoever they were, deserves some credit, as it’s too good for them to need to lurk modestly behind a pseudonym.
Next up: evensong at Bristol Cathedral on Saturday including (it had to happen) Hear my prayer by Mendelssohn.
