Hello all!

As the old thread has been replaced by a blank screen (hmmm...) I thought it might be a good thing to start it up again here.

So, to recap, the general thrust of the discussion so far has been:

Ely Cathedral Choir - great! Organ and organist - great!
Choice of music - not so good, especially responses.

Please feel free to expand/disagree.

BWS
sff

I can't agree with any of that, S-S.  I can't agree that CE is a contest, producing a 'worst' or 'best' three.  I can't agree that the choice of repertoire was as disastrous as you suggest.  I can't agree that Paul Trepte betrayed his own choir.

I have not fathomed the logic of McDowall's Introit:  I suppose it was deliberately contrived to be static, monolithic, declamatory.  I can't fathom it, and am not sure I want to Listen Again again.  But the Canticles were different.  There were some fine, mind-grabbing passages in the Magnificat, even if I was not convinced that the piece was a coherent whole;  the Nunc was genuinely interesting musically, and did hang together better.  I would rather have heard these pieces than not, and they did have something to say.

I'm liturgically conservative, and did not take immediately to Trepte's Responses.  On first contact, they are unsettling for a traditionalist, as the Cantor seems to be built into the choir - and to have the organ fiddling around during the Collects was also weird.  But, with benefit of LA, I believe we could get used to this close attachment of Versicle and Response.  Again, I was pleased to have heard the experiment, even if I reserve judgement.

I happen to know that the Ely choir is a bit short of senior choristers at the moment.  I am not appealing for a sympathy vote, but I thought they worked hard to produce a perfectly decent service - the psalms, for example, were well done with appropriate variety, and I would have expected S-S to enjoy both the typical piece of SS Wesley and the extrovert organ voluntary.  Furthermore, in the broad sweep, I reckoned it worked as a properly reverential CE.  I like to see contemporary music built into the Anglican liturgy:  if it occasionally fails to inspire to the nth degree, there is no reason to junk the whole enterprise.

For what it's worth, opinion on another forum I contribute to, most of whose members are organists and directors of music in churches, is that the choir was not on form at all, and that's why the pieces didn't come off too well.  The intonation in the psalms was definitely not up to scratch, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about those particular chants.

I wasn't taken by the responses, or by having the organ playing through the collects.  But I did like the canticles, and will be watching out for them cropping up at a service within reasonable reach.