I’m told these are the bells at Sherborne Abbey*, which may explain why all the weekends on offer for the visit of the Cathedral Chamber Choir also had a visiting team of ringers doing a lengthy peal on the Saturday. Since my previous visit the organ has been rebuilt and a new west window installed, but otherwise it was much as I remembered.<\/p>\n
We brought some relatively unusual repertoire, which I gather was appreciated by the congregation. Grayston Ives’ Missa Brevis<\/i> was written for New College Oxford and proved to have its tricky moments with some exposed entries. I’d never come across it before. Our motets were Byrd’s Ave Verum corpus<\/i> (no. 4000 on my spreadsheet of things I’ve sung) and Scio enim<\/i> by Lassus, the latter also new to me and with some startling harmonic shifts and another exposed entry (sopranos come in at the beginning on a top G). In fact I’ve sung surprisingly little Lassus.<\/p>\n
Our evensong partnered music by William Lloyd Webber and Leighton, with the former’s Sing the Life<\/i> and Most glorious Lord of Life<\/i> and the lattter’s Second Service and responses. I think I prefer the Second Service to the First, but I get asked to sing it less often.<\/p>\n
We sang just the two Sunday services, but the Abbey encouraged us to include a generous amount of music, with both Kyrie and Gloria at the Eucharist, two motets, and an introit at Evensong.<\/p>\n
There’s a video here<\/a>.<\/p>\n * It’s the heaviest set of 8 bells usable for change-ringing worldwide, and 9th heaviest overall. See here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m told these are the bells at Sherborne Abbey*, which may explain why all the weekends on offer for the visit of the Cathedral Chamber Choir also had a visiting team of ringers doing a lengthy peal on the Saturday. … Continue reading