A few years ago Elgar’s The Spirit of the Lord<\/i> was the anthem at a forthcoming service I was due to sing in. In the run up to this we had several different conductors taking rehearsals and this anthem was dutifully rehearsed each week, even though there was other music we were less familiar with that needed attention. Generally, I feel I’ve been over-exposed to it over the years and so now I have a definite aversion to it, unless in its original context as the opening of The Apostles<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately I found myself singing it twice in one weekend, this being an occupational hazard of Pentecost (this feast is not as badly off as Easter, but is not well endowed with anthems). The first was a special evensong at Gloucester Cathedral, originally intended to celebrate the completion of work on the organ, and sung by members of Gloucester Choral Society, mostly those who weren’t also singing in the Three Choirs Festival chorus.<\/p>\n
The piece which took most learning was Donald Hunt’s setting of the Responses – not the ones cobbled together from bits of Wesley in E and other pieces by S S Wesley, but some he’d written himself more or less in the style of Sumsion. Normally Responses take up little time in rehearsal (with some exceptions such as Howells’) but these, although not hard for the most part, were quite florid with a lot of notes which had to be learnt. In the end we didn’t sing the Lord’s Prayer. I hadn’t come across them before; maybe they are only in the repertoire at Worcester?<\/p>\n
The Worcester connexion was maintained with Blair in B minor canticles. Our introit was another Pentecost standard, Tallis’ If ye love me<\/i>. Unfortunately the Cathedral organ wasn’t ready yet so we were still accompanied on the toaster which didn’t really do justice to the Blair or the Elgar.<\/p>\n
On Sunday at Bath Abbey more Tallis (O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit<\/i>) and Grayston Ives’ Sanctus appeared alongside the Elgar. As there is quite a lot of room for interpretation in this piece it wasn’t a carbon copy of Saturday’s performance. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few years ago Elgar’s The Spirit of the Lord was the anthem at a forthcoming service I was due to sing in. In the run up to this we had several different conductors taking rehearsals and this anthem was … Continue reading