When you have a "thing" about choral evensong, the great thing about the UK is the variety of venues, choirs and services. Because of the timing of this trip, during the Easter holiday, I haven't been able to attend quite as many services as I would have liked, but I'm grateful nonetheless for, so far, three very different experiences.
At King's College, Cambridge, I attended Maundy Thursday Eucharist, Good Friday Evensong, and Easter Festal Evensong. As a teenager, I listened to every recording from King's I could get my hands on, and the chapel's four-second reverberation became (unfairly, of course!) my standard for the men and boys' choir sound. What always astonishes me when I attend a service there is that the reverberation is real. Quite literally, you hear the choir's sound heading up to the (fan-vaulted) heavens. You never quite know when you are in line for the service where you will be able to sit, but if it is anywhere near the choir (in the parallel stalls facing each other across the chapel's center aisle), there is a unique sense of belonging that you don't get in churches where the "congregation" is in the center and the choir is singing from the front, the side, or a choir loft. I suspect that quite apart from the King's choir's excellence, this will always be my favorite place to attend evensong.
After my "encounter" with Julian two weeks ago, I headed over to Norwich Cathedral for evensong. On this occasion, I found myself seated right behind the visiting choir's bass section, and I was the one reverberating! This was a big mixed choir and they did a fine job of some very big music, the Blair in B minor and the Naylor Vox Dicentes.
And then yesterday, in London, I attended evensong at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, on Trafalgar Square, which is an 18th century building in a more traditional church style, without parallel choir stalls. Their choral scholars, arrayed in a semi-circle up front, sang a gloriously beautiful service -- the two young women sopranos had perhaps the purest voices I've ever heard anywhere. After evensong at a college chapel or cathedral, you usually exit into the quiet confines of a quadrangle or close. What was interesting at St. Martin was exiting to the absolute pandemonium of Trafalgar Square, which must be one of the busiest few acres in London. That contrast between the peace of the service and the bustle outside was acute.
In Norwich, I sat next to a man who must have been well into his 90's, and I noticed during the psalms that he was silently lip-synching with the choir (something I have to force myself not to do.) After the service, I asked if he had been in a choir and he said yes, as a boy. He said he still wishes he could sing. Yesterday, there was a twenty-something man doing the same thing a row ahead of me. How many services are attended by former choristers who almost cannot not sing along to the music they love? From what I gather (and from video clips I've seen from the 1950's and early 1960's), the standard of singing continues to get higher and higher over time; perhaps the "inner" sound of retired singers is adding to that spiritual intensity and musical excellence.
