Guildford is hardly your standard cathedral – it looks so like a cinema that one almost expects the organ to come up through a hole in the floor. We (the Erleigh Cantors) were made welcome on a return visit there at the end of July, at a time when many other churches would have been inaccessible. As it was, we seemed to have more than the usual number of psalms and hymns with references to floods in.<\/p>\n
I won’t list all the music but there were a couple of new pieces for me – for example, Verdi’s Pater Noster<\/em>, actually a setting of an expanded paraphrase in Italian by Dante. Another anthem which I’d never sung was Angels<\/em> by Tavener, which reminded me of various pieces by Britten, such as his Antiphon<\/em> and Rejoice in the Lamb<\/em>.<\/p>\n Some other music I hadn’t sung for a while, such as Willan’s huge anthem Gloria Deo per immensa s\u00e6cula<\/em>, and that mysterious absentee from the Priory Records set of Mags\/Nuncs, William Matthias’ ‘Jesus College’ evening canticles. I like these apart from the Rutteroid ‘aaahs’ in the Nunc.<\/p>\n In the course of my two visits to sing at Guildford Cathedral I’ve now heard no fewer than six sermons on the subject of Mary Magdalene.<\/p>\n How empty my blog looks as I write this! The right-hand menu extends far below the entries on the left. I hope to put up several more posts between now and the end of August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Guildford is hardly your standard cathedral – it looks so like a cinema that one almost expects the organ to come up through a hole in the floor. We (the Erleigh Cantors) were made welcome on a return visit there … Continue reading