For a few years until I moved to Manchester in the early 90’s I was a resident member of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where I did a PhD. degree. Part of the reason for continuing my studies at Cambridge were the positive reports I’d heard about the lively choir scene there, and these proved to be well founded. Here I’ll just write about what I did with chapel choirs.
There was a well-recognised hierarchy of College chapel choirs. This was impressed on singers even before they arrived, since a table in the undergraduate prospectus indicated which ones did broadcasts/recordings/foreign tours etc. and how many choral awards each choir offered. At the top end of the mixed-voice choirs were those of Clare and Trinity, which were for example the only ones which did evensong broadcasts (nowadays one would add Caius).
Behind them were a number of well-resourced choirs, generally with a professional if part-time director of music. I suppose this was my natural level, since I sang for a year in one such choir (Christ’s) and was at various times approached by three others (St. Catharine’s, Selwyn and the Jesus mixed-voice choir). People sang in choirs other than that of their own College for all sorts of reasons and poaching of singers was frequent when a choir was short of a particular voice.
However, for most of my time in Cambridge I sang at Corpus, and for some of it held an internal choral award there. Lest I seem to be disparaging my own College by ranking it after the others I have mentioned, I should add that the repertoire and standard there seemed to me to exceed that of any Oxford mixed chapel choir at the time (with one exception) and that of all parish choirs now in almost all places I have direct knowledge of. Indeed, by one rather crude measurement used to rank choirs – how many singers sang in the University’s leading chamber choir – Corpus came out well, since at one point during my time it contained five such singers; and while I was in Manchester I encountered two former members of the choir studying singing at the RNCM.
We sang three services a week, including a 9 a.m. eucharist or matins on Sunday mornings (which may go a long way to explaining why I’m still more willing than most to turn out and sing at this time). There were occasional concerts in College and elsewhere in Cambridge and day trips to sing at churches with a College connexion, or cathedrals; usually in the summer we did a week of services at a Cathedral, though I also sang in two foreign tours.
I’ll say a little about recordings, of which I sang on three. I made a cassette recording of music by S. S. Wesley for Christ’s, which included the first complete recording of the service in E major. The same week (!) I made an LP recording for Corpus which featured amongst other things Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia and Stanford’s three Latin motets. I don’t think this sold many copies, but it was well reviewed in Choir & Organ, which described it as ‘a recommendable release’.
A year later I went on a choir tour to Canterbury and St. Paul’s Cathedrals with the choir of St. Catharine’s College, at the end of which we made a recording. The programme was built around six motets by Edward Dent which had not been previously recorded. The rest of the programme mostly had a Cambridge connexion, and included music by Robin Holloway and Bernard Rose, those Stanford motets again and the spirituals from A Child of Our Time. This programme was recorded over a couple of days and with a more perfectionist approach than the other two, since it was intended for a wider distribution, but for various reasons the results were never released.
I’ve been back to Corpus for some enjoyable reunions of former members of the chapel choir. These usually culminate in a choral evensong in Chapel, though I suspect the results have sounded rather odd, not just because of a liquid lunch earlier on but also because many of those who accepted the invitation were in the choir before it went mixed and so the sound has been unusually bottom-heavy!