For the second year in a row the Chamber Choir sang at the Abbey on Ash Wednesday. We opened with Purcell Remember not, Lord<\/i>, used Byrd’s Four-Part mass as the setting, and during the Ashing sang Lotti’s setting of the Miserere, which I’d not come across before. It is a through-composed setting of the entire text, all very much on a level and not modulating far, so that you can stop at the end of any verse with no worse consequences than being in a different but closely related key to the one in which you started. Everyone in the congregation was ashed (very thoroughly) by about two-thirds of the way through, so that’s how much we sang. <\/p>\n
For the second Sunday in Lent we sang choral evensong, with the Weelkes short service (like Byrd’s, I’ve sung this far less often than Gibbons Short) and a work I’d never done in a service: Byrd’s diptych of Ne irascaris<\/i> and Civitas sancti tui<\/i>. This last had long been on my wishlist, after I’d heard it many times on Lenten evensong broadcasts. I had sung Civitas sancti tui<\/i> on its own, informally, at a Chantry Singers reunion event. So, what about that accidental in bar 96, eh? Editions and performers are split about this one, but we did it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the second year in a row the Chamber Choir sang at the Abbey on Ash Wednesday. We opened with Purcell Remember not, Lord, used Byrd’s Four-Part mass as the setting, and during the Ashing sang Lotti’s setting of the … Continue reading