Watch the video of last Sunday’s Choral Evensong on YouTube.
If you would like to participate in our next service live on Zoom video conference, please sign up to our mailing list to receive joining details.
After a week’s break, welcome to our 11th ‘Choral Evensong from Home’ series – for our Patronal Festival (St James).
I am Director of Music at St James, and the music in this video is performed by four members of the choir who also happen to be part of my family!
We set up a little studio in my home office, which is a cabin at the bottom of our garden (I have a digital organ there), and sang everything from there. Mother Katie led the service, two members of the choir read the lessons, and one of our basses acted as host of the Zoom meeting.
Ordinarily we would be part of a larger team comprising the full resources of four-part (soprano, alto, tenor and bass – SATB) choir. Within our family we can only call on two of these parts (we are sopranos and tenors), and are exploring ways to render something that (hopefully!) continues to be musically rich and satisfying to listeners. We are discovering a whole new (to us) repertoire of music primarily intended for one or two voice parts!
This is the first time we have brought back something new from earlier in the series. By way of commemorating and celebrating St James, we decided to reprise the fabulous ‘Collegium Magdalenae Oxoniense’ setting by Jonathan White of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. New (to us) music continues to feature too, this time in the beautiful form of Bob Chilcott’s “The Lord’s my Shepherd”.
Mother Katie also introduced an experimental “Zoom breakout session” as part of the Homily and Prayers. The interactive session has been omitted from this recording, but the prayers (expertly rendered impromptu by Mother Katie) are based on the contributions of people within the service.
We hope you enjoy how the service came together. Please use the YouTube ‘Like’ (thumbs up) feature for our videos and also click ‘Subscribe’ to keep in touch with our latest uploads.
Many thanks and best wishes,
Jason Edge
The order of service:
- Organ – Adagio in Ab from Sonata No.1 for Organ – Mendelssohn
- Welcome
- Opening Hymn – The Servant Song
- Sung Responses (Disraeli Brown)
- Psalm 76 (Responsorial)
- Old Testament Reading: 1 Kings 6: 11-14, 23-38
- Magnificat – Collegium Magdalenae Oxoniense (Jonathan White)
- New Testament Reading: Acts 12: 1 – 17
- Nunc Dimittis – Collegium Magdalenae Oxoniense (Jonathan White)
- Creed and Sung Responses (Disraeli Brown)
- Anthem – The Lord’s my Shepherd (Bob Chilcott)
- Homily and Prayers
- Closing Hymn – Guide me, O thou great redeemer
- Organ Voluntary – War March of the Priests (from ‘Athalie’ by Mendelssohn, arranged for organ by W.T. Best)