Remember Not, Lord, Our Offences....

...aka The Sunday Choral Report.

This morning was not the choir's finest hour.

It was all good in rehearsal.  Is that the sign of doom?

The processional was Praise My Soul the King of Heaven with "updated" words, thanks to the Catholic Book of Worship III.  Heavens - am I turning into an old fogie?  This is one of the most gorgeous hymns evah.  I sang it often in my Presbyterian days...it's one of those hymns that rests in your heart and head, and when you have to sing it with castrated text, it's just wrong.  Here is the original text.

Moving on.

We prepared Remember Not, Lord, Our Offences by Purcell for the Offertory.  Now, we were short altos this morning, and our soloist-slash-strong singer was away sick.  The work had a split soprano part and so one of the altos moved over to sing Soprano II mid-way through rehearsal.  The remaining two of us were fine.  But when we got up into the loft, and stood in our positions in a semi-circle around the organ, next to people we weren't next to in rehearsal, in a room where the sound is completely different....  It kinda fell apart in the middle, and then reconvened to bring us home.  It's a gorgeous piece.  You can go here to listen to the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge.  The text:

Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers;  neither take thou vengeance of our sins:  spare us, good Lord, spare thy people,whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood, and be not angry with us for ever.  Spare us, good Lord.

The Communion hymn was To Thee O Lord by Rachmaninoff.  It was fine, quite lovely in fact.  And we took them out with Tell Out My Soul, a camp favorite from the summers of my youth.