Finally I got to sing my first choral evensong in 18 months. The Cathedral Chamber Choir was in residence at Portsmouth Cathedral (rearranged from Salisbury) for a week, many of us staying in Rees Hall towards Southsea. It’s a very long time since I sang here, my previous visit being a service with the Erleigh Cantors not long after they were founded.<\/p>\n
Our programme mixed music from various periods, with some pieces new to me and\/or the choir. Dealing with the first half of the week: I had never before sung Robert Walker’s As the Apple Tree<\/em>. This uses an aleatoric technique popular in the 1980s; the singers are at one point invited to sing set notes freely in any speed\/rhythm they like, being brought in individually and all ending together. This sort of device seems to derive from the War Requiem<\/i>, but never really caught on in church music, despite the efforts of Jonathan Harvey et al. It’s still being used elsewhere – I most recently encountered it in the new Judith Weir piece I recorded last year.<\/p>\n As we were getting used to singing as a group, and indeed to singing close to other people, most of the rest was familiar at least to me, though I had not sung Tomkins ‘Fifth’ Service for a while, and had only done Matthew Martin’s Te Lucis ante Terminum<\/em> once before. As with the Walker, a setting I actually prefer to the normal setting of the same words.<\/p>\n We spaced ourselves out at readers holding a pair of singers, with the precentor and congregation the far side of a kind of bulkhead affair in the middle of the Cathedral that holds up the tower. A benefit of a dispersed congregation was that the service was livestreamed and then available on the Cathedral’s Facebook page.<\/p>\n Part 2 to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Finally I got to sing my first choral evensong in 18 months. The Cathedral Chamber Choir was in residence at Portsmouth Cathedral (rearranged from Salisbury) for a week, many of us staying in Rees Hall towards Southsea. It’s a very … Continue reading