The last couple of weeks have been busy. There was a funeral at which the music included Stanford’s Blue Bird<\/i>, performed at the end as the coffin was carried out. I did the solo in this and hadn’t encountered it at a funeral before, or indeed at any time of year other than the summer. But it didn’t seem out of place.<\/p>\n
I returned to hear the Boyan Ensemble of Kiev perform a mixture of sacred and secular music. I admired their stamina, not only in doing a tour with a performance almost every night, but also in performing a concert programme without instrumental music to give the singers a rest. It was interesting to hear, for example, counter-tenor singing Ukrainian style, but I think I preferred the sacred music in the first half of the concert. The folk-songs in the second part were a bit over-arranged for my taste – it almost had me wishing for some John Rutter. The church pieces were more sober, though less melancholy than such music often is because they were themed around the Easter season.<\/p>\n
For All Souls’ day we performed the Requiem setting by Charpentier, new to me, but then as I’ve said before much of this composer is under-performed. This sets a rather unusual selection of texts from the Requiem Mass, with a De Profundis for good measure. As with other music I’ve done by this composer, the notes are not hard but the pitch is consistently high.<\/p>\n
An account of the Erleigh Cantors’ visit to Wells will follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The last couple of weeks have been busy. There was a funeral at which the music included Stanford’s Blue Bird, performed at the end as the coffin was carried out. I did the solo in this and hadn’t encountered it … Continue reading