Click here to Launch Service Player| Responses and Preces | Howells |
| Psalms | 109 |
| Canticles | Moore (St John's Service) |
| Anthem | Orr: They that put their trust in the Lord |
| Hymn | 244 |
Dec Bass III writes:
The Choir is currently having a well earned rest from services, so this weeks service is from earlier in the last term. The Choir landed safely on Friday after an exciting two week tour, having completed the last phase of the tour in Texas. The Texans were so universally welcoming - after two weeks on tour, people often begin to get tired, but the end of this tour was a real pleasure and a terrific amount of fun, with concerts in Houston, Austin and finally Waco. Meeting up again with some of the students from Texas University in Austin (they visited Cambridge last summer) was a particular highlight. The Choir is now resting until the concert on Saturday 18 April. The concert is part of the Cambridge Cantat 800, a university-wide festival of choral music celebrating the 800th birthday of the University of Cambridge.
Click here to listen to a part of a concert from Christ Church, Greenwich CT, USA
This service was recorded on the 27 January. I was pleased to hear that this was the service this week. Although we vary the canticles and anthem every day, there are, I suppose, about 6 or 7 settings of the Preces and Responses that get used in rotation. It is therefore always pretty refreshing to sing a new setting, and I had long wanted to sing this setting by Herbert Howells. We sing so much of his music and it had always seemed an omission that we had not tackled them before. Howells integrates the cantoring with the choral parts and they seem more organic and cohesive than many of the more conventional sets.
Here we also have the Moore setting of the canticles, which he wrote for this Choir three years ago, to be sung for the Ash Wednesday service. The lyricism of the setting fits the choir particularly well, and the simplicity of them makes them so very appropriate for this liturgical season. The anthem, They that put their trust in the Lord, was written by Robin Orr, one time Organist of our College. I took the opportunity to write a little about him earlier this year (click here to read more).
