{"id":6602,"date":"2024-02-27T22:24:58","date_gmt":"2024-02-27T22:24:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/?p=6602"},"modified":"2024-04-09T22:25:14","modified_gmt":"2024-04-09T22:25:14","slug":"a-split-weekend-in-the-fens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/2024\/02\/27\/a-split-weekend-in-the-fens\/","title":{"rendered":"a split weekend in the Fens"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Cathedral Chamber Choir <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/2016\/04\/29\/cambridge-surprise-major\/\">returned<\/a> to Great St Mary&#8217;s Church in Cambridge, where our musical director is now based, this time combining it with evensong in Ely Cathedral.<\/p>\n<p>Ely remained pleasantly unchanged (although I miss the poster of ground-plans of Cathedrals which used to hang in the song room).  Our music combined the familiar (Bairstow&#8217;s <i>Save us O Lord<\/i> and Tomkins Responses) with dredging up memories of Noble in A minor, a setting I have only sung once before, many years ago when I was a student.  I was pleased to be able to sing the full psalmody for the day.<\/p>\n<p>Sunday was sung with a very different acoustic and organ (curiously, the University Church in Cambridge has two organs, one for University use and one for the parish; its Oxford equivalent has the same organ for everyone).  Our Sunday morning setting was Berkeley&#8217;s Missa Brevis which I&#8217;d sung recently with the Erleigh Cantors, but as it was Lent we got to do the Kyrie which I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;d ever done before.  Our anthem was definitely new to me: Whitlock&#8217;s &#8216;Be still my soul&#8217;, which proved to have some rather unexpected twists in it.<\/p>\n<p>At evensong, Dyson in F was dropped in favour of Moeran in D, another setting undisturbed since my student days and which was actually better than I remembered.  We focused our rehearsal time on Finzi&#8217;s <i>Welcome, sweet and sacred feast<\/i>, which I have only ever sung with this choir.  It was originally published alongside <i>God is gone up<\/i> and <i>My lovely one<\/i> and one might well ask why one never comes across <i>My lovely one<\/i>?  Maybe it is too specific to weddings to fit into other services, but given that I&#8217;ve sung for a number of diehard Finzi fans, I&#8217;m surprised I haven&#8217;t sung it even in a concert, or even heard it.<\/p>\n<p>Back to <i>Welcome sweet and sacred feast<\/i> &#8211; to me, it recalls his Magnificat in particular in places and there&#8217;s one passage which makes me wonder whether it inspired the hymn tune &#8216;Gonfalon Royal&#8217;.  It was good to end the weekend with a large-scale but not standard work.<br \/>\n<div id=\"attachment_6630\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/gsm-scaled.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6630\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/gsm-300x69.jpg\" alt=\"A personalised GSM drain cover\" width=\"300\" height=\"69\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-6630\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/gsm-300x69.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/gsm-1024x234.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/gsm-768x176.jpg 768w, http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/gsm-1536x351.jpg 1536w, http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/gsm-2048x468.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-6630\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A personalised GSM drain cover<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Cathedral Chamber Choir returned to Great St Mary&#8217;s Church in Cambridge, where our musical director is now based, this time combining it with evensong in Ely Cathedral. Ely remained pleasantly unchanged (although I miss the poster of ground-plans of &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/2024\/02\/27\/a-split-weekend-in-the-fens\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20],"tags":[431,225,78,230,1223,178,76,200,47,1369],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6602"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6602"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6632,"href":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6602\/revisions\/6632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.virginiaknight.org.uk\/vhkssinging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}