CE Portsmouth Cathedral Wed, 13th June 2018 [L]

[edashtav]

Easy mistake to make...so much recent church music falling into the stylistic gap that ed so admirably describes.

You’re too kind, ardcarp. I’m not sure whether to plead guilty to filibustering or philistinism, M’Lud.

In my (pathetic) defence: everything that I wrote was a true reaction to P.Moore’s Anthem but “God Be In My Head” by t’other Philip, which I have conducted several times in recent months, was in Ed’s ‘ED.

[edashtav]

Moving on to Stanford in Bb. I felt it was good to hear a Cathedral Choir and Organist in this once-hackneyed piece. We tend to think of its popularity as a Victorian phenomenon but it was not. Although composed in the 1870s, Novello did not publish it until the year after Queen Victoria’s Death (1902) It was a ‘slow burner’ in Edwardian times but Parish Choirs found it accessible after the First World War. The work became ubiquitous in the 1920s.