I returned to St. Alban’s Cathedral rather sooner than expected, on the weekend of Low Sunday with the Peterborough Chamber Choir. I sang two evensongs, dashing off after the first one to a photoshoot followed by a College dinner in Cambridge. Both evensongs featured long Magnificats (the congregation were given a spoken dispensation to sit down). On the Saturday we sang the setting by Arvo P\u00e4rt, which I had long wanted to do. Now I’ll probably get to do it with lots of other groups.<\/p>\n
On Sunday our Magnificat was the setting in B flat for double choir by Stanford. This always brings back memories of staring at the stained-glass windows in King’s College Chapel, trying to work out what the biblical stories in them were. I used to go to evensong there sometimes on Fridays, when they used unaccompanied settings to give their organ scholar a night off. This one seemed to crop up a great deal, in the days when no one else performed it very much. We did it rather faster than I’m used to, but otherwise it can be interminable!<\/p>\n
Our Nuncs were Naylor in A and the Geoffrey Burgon setting. I hadn’t sung the latter before – it is one of few pieces of church music that I still associate with a TV series. Usually such associations are weak for me and easily broken.<\/p>\n
Sunday was a big sing because we also did the Howells responses. At least I did not repeat the mistake I made in the 3rd Amen last time I sang 2nd soprano in these (it was one of the rare occasions when I really couldn’t find my note, rather than just being careless). The P\u00e4rt wasn’t the only new piece for me as we sang some responses by McPhee (very rarely done it seems) and a setting of Exultate Deo by Hendrik Andriessen, the first piece by him that I’d performed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I returned to St. Alban’s Cathedral rather sooner than expected, on the weekend of Low Sunday with the Peterborough Chamber Choir. I sang two evensongs, dashing off after the first one to a photoshoot followed by a College dinner in … Continue reading