a memorial service in Wells

Posted on July 15, 2026 by vhk10

I was invited to attend a memorial service for Martin, who was a long-standing member of a choir I visit Cathedrals with; we often found ourselves travelling home together on the train. It was held in the quire at Wells Cathedral and well attended, with some people having travelled a considerable distance.

As I suspect the majority of the congregation were themselves singers, we were allowed to sing in one of the anthems, Bach’s O Jesu Christ, mein Lebens Licht: easy enough if you are a soprano as you have the straightforward tune. I think I was standing behind two of the tiny minority of unmusical people present (neighbours? relations?); at any rate they didn’t seem to appreciate this.

Wells Cathedral Chamber Choir and Costanzi Consort sang Alessandro Scarlatti’s Exsurge Domine which I didn’t know and Byrd’s Haec Dies, which I did. Wells’ chamber choir is comparable to Bath Abbey Chamber Choir, indeed they were founded at the same time, and I believe a joint service is proposed.

I thought the whole service was a fitting tribute to Martin and we were collectively grateful to the Cathedral for allowing it to take place there. I was also able to use the occasion to get a Wells Cathedral Pass, which allows me as a member of a church in the Diocese to visit the Cathedral outside services without paying. I suspect this scheme is underused as it appeared that the welcome desk team weren’t familiar with the process for issuing passes, although there must be thousands of people who are entitled to one.

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Saturday night headliners

Posted on June 30, 2026 by vhk10

For a second year Bath Abbey Chamber Choir sang the ‘First evensong of the Patronal Festival’ of SS Peter and Paul, on a Saturday. (I missed last year’s service.) It’s a chance to push the boat out a bit, more for some in the choir than for others. I thought of what we’d chosen as within what I’d call standard repertoire, others felt they’d been stretched.

What we did was Howells’ Gloucester canticles and Ascribe unto the Lord by anniversary composer Wesley, along with the Ayleward Responses and Duruflé’s Tu es Petrus. It was good to see a substantial congregation, even though there were other special services on the Sunday for them to go to.

A Glastonbury-connected member of the choir commented that in the absence of the festival there this year ‘Get them (Howells and Wesley) on the Pyramid!’

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the darkness and the light are both alike

Posted on June 10, 2026 by vhk10

The Erleigh Cantors’ annual concert shifted again from May to June.

The concert this year very nearly didn’t happen at all! While we were eating or getting changed in the interval between rehearsal and concert, there was a very localised power cut which took out the electricity from the church (St Peter’s Earley) and the church hall, but very little else. An electrician was despatched from the local power company and managed to restore lights just in time for it to go ahead, as our audience waited patiently. We had been prepared to use clip-on lights on our folders and other emergency measures.

We presented an Anglo-Italian programme, as we did once before in 2013. There was some overlap with that concert: Gabrieli’s Jubilate Deo, Vaughan Williams’ Shakespeare Songs and Ronald Corp’s Missa San Marco. I hadn’t realised that Corp had actually been a near neighbour of mine in Bath for some years until his death last year; his music-making was in London. Vaughan Williams’ songs are brief but demanding, probably because they were written as a competition piece and so intended to reveal any technical flaws in a choir that sings them!

Other Italian pieces were Monteverdi’s Cantate Domino, Gesualdo’s O vos omnes, Gabrieli’s Exsultet and Lassus’ echo madrigal where we put our echo quartet at the far end of the church.

The rest of the English side of the programme was by John Rutter. As in 2013 we included a jazzier sequence, in this case his spiritual arrangements Feel the Spirit. These explore a variety of styles including funk and ragtime, along with what might consider characteristically ‘Rutteroid’. O Lord Thou hast searched me out, dating from 2007, was unknown to me and also used our oboist/cor anglais player Frances Jones; it alludes to plainchant. Our encore was the setting of Psalm 23 from his Requiem. A good thing it all went ahead as the singing and the interval bar raised a healthy sum for the church and for Alexander Devine Children’s Hospice.

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Back at the International Festival

Posted on June 6, 2026 by vhk10

The Bath International Music Festival, after nearly being subsumed entirely in the Literature Festival (I didn’t go to any of the handful of concerts in it last year as it clashed with my Romanian choir tour) now no longer runs concurrently with it and there was a satisfactory selection of concerts.

Others in the family went to a couple of piano recitals: firstly, Richard Goode playing Beethoven’s last three Sonatas (and op. 119 Bagatelles) in St Mary’s Bathwick. Goode is an undemonstrative pianist and his interpretations of his chosen repertoire have been refined over the years; with him, you know what you are getting. Later, Ethan Loch in St Swithin’s Church played some of his own compositions amongst other things including Liszt’s sonata and Chopin’s third Scherzo. It seemed that he had carefully chosen repertoire that suited him, though without much dynamic variation, even in the Liszt! The Chopin seemed to suit him best; his own compositions were not especially interesting.

I went to the last concert of all (thereby getting a free Festival programme), Brecon Baroque also in St Swithin’s Church. This was ‘The Muses Restor’d’: sequences of pieces from the English 17th and early 18th century, many by composers I hadn’t previously encountered, although Purcell, Blow and Handel also featured. Some had drawn on folk music (chiefly Scottish) for their inspiration, and much of it was suitable for dancing, which brought it close to the folk fiddle repertoire I heard a few years ago. As you would expect, there was a handsome array of instruments including an archlute (or was it a theorbo? I’m never quite sure how to distinguish them.)

Soon after the Festival ended we received our Mozartfest 2026 brochures. For a time the Mozartfest overtook the International Music Festival for its calibre of performers; I’d say they are currently about level.

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fizz and cake for volunteers

Posted on June 5, 2026 by vhk10

It was Volunteers’ Week and there was a special evensong at the Abbey, with the men and boys singing Stanford in G and For lo, I raise up. It was well attended, possibly helped because there was a party at the back of the Abbey afterwards.

Chamber Choir members count as Abbey volunteers, and get the same perks such as a year’s free trial membershop of the Friends of Bath Abbey. We are exceptional in that we aren’t based in the ‘Volunteers Room’ so miss seeing anything that’s placed there. It also gives us a rather ambiguous status in the Abbey musical establishment. When we were invited to be singing extras in an episode of Macdonald and Dodds, we weren’t paid by the production company, unlike singers brought in from outside. It’s also unclear what would happen if the Chamber Choir sang at a wedding in the Abbey that wasn’t that of a choir member. The choir of Christ Church Bath (and parish churches I’ve sung in) would be paid a standard rate in that situation.

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I never want to sing The Spirit of the Lord again

Posted on May 28, 2026 by vhk10

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 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.

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.

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?

The Worcester connexion was maintained with Blair in B minor canticles. Our introit was another Pentecost standard, Tallis’ If ye love me. 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.

On Sunday at Bath Abbey more Tallis (O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit) 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.

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Liszt at Covent Garden

Posted on May 6, 2026 by vhk10

I went to the ballet for the first time in some years, to see the Royal Ballet perform Mayerling, choosing this because the plot appealed to me more than the usual fairy stories.

The score was adapted from music by Liszt, appropriately enough since Hungarian nationalism is an important theme. I didn’t recognise most of it apart from the Mephisto Waltz, although I wasn’t following the score too closely (there was a lot to take in on stage) and his orchestral music in particular is not well known to me.

Liszt turns up in other ballet scores, for example Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, which uses an orchestration of his B minor sonata. (Or rather orchestrations, as two different ones have been used. I think the sonata is so pianistic that it doesn’t readily lend itself to this treatment.)

I realise now that there must be a lot of skill in matching action to music in cases where you have a pre-existing piece (rather than commissioning a score to fit your scenario) especially where there is a lot of action to accommodate. The music needs to fit the action, and the action needs to look dramatically plausible and not overly stretched out or compressed to fit a particular moment in the music. Not being a balletomane, I’d never considered this before.

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a funeral and an anniversary

Posted on May 4, 2026 by vhk10

Having not sung there for a long time, I returned to St Mary’s Bathwick to sing twice within the space of a month, for a sorrowful and a joyful occasion.

The first was the funeral of a former priest-in-charge at my church, who had latterly attended St Mary’s. The choir was a combination of singers from both churches and the music included the Nunc from Dyson in D and Thomas Campion’s Never weather-beaten sail.

It wasn’t long till I was back to help one of their singers celebrate 30 years in the choir. A specially assembled chorus sang evensong with two favourites of mine: Stanford in A and that Parratt chant in lots of parts. Walter Parratt almost invariably transposed the line of the first quarter of his chants to make the third quarter, usually down a third, and this one is no exception. We also sang Stanford’s Beati quorum via, Wood’s Hail gladdening light and the Rose responses. The enlarged choir included people I hadn’t seen for some years, including members of choirs I’ve formerly sung with such as the Bath Camerata and Priory Voices.

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from Palm Sunday to Good Friday

Posted on April 9, 2026 by vhk10

The Abbey Chamber Choir got to sing two services in Holy Week. As last year, we provided the music for the afternoon service on Palm Sunday, but this time it was a straightforward evensong. Somehow Ernest Bullock’s canticles in D have passed me by; I have certainly heard other people sing them but had never done them myself until now. The Responses by our conductor Adam Field were less surprisingly also new to me, being only a few years old. (Worth checking out if you are looking for a 4-part setting that won’t take long to learn.)

The highlight though for me was the first part of Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah, including that monotone. Some other sopranos in the choir complained about it, but it’s like that lightbulb joke; you hold onto the note and the rest of the choir revolves around you. And you do get your highest note right at the end before everyone else has to wait for you to place the third of the final chord and leave it floating there. I have never performed the second part of the Lamentations although I have sung it through; the words need a trigger warning if you understand Latin.

On Maundy Thursday we struck a slightly more cheerful note with Grayston Ives’ Missa Brevis (in which I sang the soprano solo part in the Gloria) and as in 2024 the motets were Duruflé’s Ubi Caritas and de Séverac’s Tantum Ergo.

Good Friday at Christ Church was mostly familiar pieces that we sing at this service such as Christus factus est by Bruckner, Tučapský’s Pater meus and Ireland’s Greater Love, but there was something new to me: Morley’s Funeral Sentences.

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a belated return to Tewkesbury

Posted on April 1, 2026 by vhk10

‘O soft, self-wounding Pelican’ 18th-century wooden statue, Tewkesbury Abbey

I have not sung in Tewkesbury Abbey in a long time; my only previous occasion was a day trip for a Saturday evensong with my church choir from Manchester. It was good to have an opportunity to return with Gloucester Choral Society (and Jonathan Hope conducting), whose normal base is unusable while the organ is being put back in place. We were warned that it could be cold, but of course we are used to that.

Our first half opened with Elgar’s Te Deum and Benedictus, which I’m always glad to have a chance to sing; in fact it’s not long since I did the Te Deum. This was followed by another very familiar piece to me (but not to many others in the choir), Finzi’s Lo, the Full Final Sacrifice. The main danger here was the tempo changes being rather different from those in other choirs where I’ve sung these pieces.

After the interval we sang Ian Venables’ Requiem, a piece commissioned for Gloucester Cathedral choir and sung a number of times in the area since. The composer was present, sitting a little way back in the audience. We were warned that for the most part it is slow and sustained, although not invariably so. (Maybe the faster sections just seem fast by comparison). So I found it a demanding piece to sing and it didn’t play to my strengths. The notes in themselves weren’t particularly difficult with one or two exceptions which just had to be mastered individually.

The Abbey has a gently warm acoustic and a large room for the choir to go in pre-concert, although we could have done with liberating some of the chairs which had been stacked inaccessibly in a corner. Also stable staging (not always a given), even if you had to be careful not to drop anything into the void beneath and behind your seat.

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Purcell, Charles Andrews, Ives, Morley and Byrd for Lent

Posted on March 25, 2026 by vhk10

Meanwhile at Christ Church we sang evensong mid-March with more Purcell (Thou knowest, Lord) and the ‘faux-bordon’ canticles by one Carolus Andreas.

I am suspicious of the provenance of these last. They have been reprinted by the RSCM (starting in 1900) and others, with English words that appear to be an adaptation from the Latin, but nowhere I have seen is there given a MS or published original source or even an editor. There is no independent evidence for the composer (Andreas Carolus the theologian does not seem to have composed). The name does not look English, and yet he has conveniently written a pair of canticles for the liturgy of Anglican evensong. So like the Fayrfax faux-bordons I think these are at best an adaptation of some other piece, and quite possibly a pastiche by someone called Charles Andrews (or maybe Andrew Charles). As I’ve said of other pieces, it’s a shame we don’t know because they are a lovely simple setting, and established in the repertoire (I have sung them with several different choirs). I’m throwing down the gauntlet to anyone who can prove my conjecture wrong.

Back at Bath Abbey we sang a Eucharist for Passion Sunday, slipping in the Sanctus from Grayston Ives’ Missa Brevis, and bringing out Morley’s Nolo mortem peccatoris, which we also sang last year. I assume the Morley must have been written for use in the home rather than in services; it suddenly sounds earlier than it is around bar 45, but maybe that is because it is in only two parts at that point. Morley omitted a number of rather graphic verses from the original carol.

Our motet was Civitas sancti tui on its own, which was followed by the Communion hymn Once again, ‘Thank you for the cross, my friend’.

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Purcell, Lotti and Byrd for Lent

Posted on March 2, 2026 by vhk10

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 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.

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 and Civitas sancti tui. 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 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.

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