CE Chichester Cathedral 25th April 2012

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    #16
    Originally posted by ardcarp View Post
    Good to hear from you RJ. Hope you'll often bring your experience to bear on The Choir Forum!
    Welcome RJ.

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      #17
      Just to confirm that the full CE is now on iPlayer - very fine Leighton anthem btw.
      I am reliably informed that the repeat on Sunday of the undamaged tx will run for seven days there from.

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        #18
        Having now LE-ed in peaceful surroundings and having heard the service uninterrupted, I would just like to say a big THANK YOU to Chichester for a truly excellent CE. It was, IMO, just what trad CE followers like...dignified (precentor and readers included) beautifully directed and with nothing over-blown, i.e. soloists in the canticles just popping in and out of the texture without making a big deal of it. I agree with Draco that the Leighton anthem is not only a great piece (not heard too often?) and was beautifully executed and accompanied. Good to hear the Sumsion responses given an outing too. If anything the sound of the trebles is a little more 'open' than it used to be..i.e. vowel sounds more natural and less 'covered'. Chichester is a small choir but one had to make no allowances for that.

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          #19
          I'm always surprised at Chichester at how close the front desk stalls are to each other across the choir. Tends to make whatever they do there like an intimate chamber sound, and with small forces, it surely means you should be able to hear all parts round you, and thus create a good team feel. Endorse all from ardcarp upthread.

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            #20
            Board members will be saddened to hear of the death of Dr John Birch (DoM at Chichester from 1958 - 1980) today after having suffered a large stroke a few days ago. RIP.

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              #21
              Important figure in Chichester's tapestry.

              RIP indeed.

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                #22
                John Birch was a great musician. I shall not forget his mastery in conducting Bernstein's Chichester Psalms (at a SCF in the 70s?)

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                  #23
                  I knew him in his later Chichester days. A lovely man and an absolutely superb musician. Here is an obituary written for the University of Sussex, where he was rumoured to be the only lecturer in music capable of reading figured bass!

                  Civilised, engaging, a consummate professional musician, known and admired by generations of Sussex undergraduates and graduates, Dr John Birch, who died aged 82 on 28 April following a severe stroke at his home in Chichester, was University Organist from 1967 until 1994. He was also Visiting Lecturer in Music teaching keyboard harmony (in a variety of cubby holes in Arts B, Sussex House and even the Mantell building) from 1971 to 1983. Appointed Organist and Master of the Choristers of Chichester Cathedral at the young age of 29 in 1958, where he stayed until 1980, he was commissioned to design the organ in the new Meeting House at Sussex in 1966. At Chichester alongside Dean Walter Hussey, he commissioned new work by Walton, Bernstein – the ‘Chichester’ Psalms – and Howells. At Sussex he conducted both the Meeting House Choir (with, then, a full complement of organ scholars and choral scholars) and the University Chamber Choir. He directed the annual Messiah from Scratch (for students, faculty and on occasion inmates from Lewes Prison, for whose sensitivities he tended to refer to ‘measures’ rather than ‘bars’, and omitted “Let us break their bonds asunder” entirely). With the late Stephen Medcalf he devised the annual Christmas Carol Services (once broadcast on BBC Radio Brighton) and he gave regular brilliant lunchtime organ recitals every term. An honorary MA was conferred on him by Sussex in 1971 and he was later awarded an Honorary Lambeth Doctorate in Music by the Archbishop of Canterbury. John relished his stint as President of the Burgon Society, founded to promote the study of Academical Dress. He played the organ for degree ceremonies until his many other roles – at the Royal College of Music or the Royal Albert Hall, playing and touring with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, as Organist of Temple Church from 1982 for fifteen years – later becoming a Honorary Bencher, or as President of the Royal College of Organists - meant he had to record the music for use in absentia. John also played the organ for a Canadian television recording of Yehudi Menuhin conducting Brighton Festival Chorus in excerpts from ‘Messiah’ in the Meeting House in 1978. He was appointed when Dr David Jenkins (father of Sir Simon) was University Chaplain, served under three more and as many Vice-Chancellors, and, such was his continued interest in the university, John attended the first major social event of the Suss-Ex Club for former staff, a dinner at the House of Lords a few years ago. Still Organist to the RPO (having clocked up over 90 performances of the Saint-Saens ‘Organ’ Symphony with them and other orchestras all over the world in his long career) and Curator-Organist at the Royal Albert Hall, he played for a number of concerts in the Albert Hall earlier this year and maintained his bonhomie and joie de vivre almost to the end.

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                    #24
                    I was a chorister at Chichester in 1958 when John Birch arrived. He immediately set about enlarging the choir library with music that, by today's reckoning, is regular repertoire but was totally unfamiliar to Chichester after a long exposure to plainsong and Merbecke. Who'd heard of Stanford, or Francis Jackson et al, let alone Kenneth Leighton and certainly not Herbert Howells! Every practice was an adventure, an exploration of 'new' settings and anthems often enlivened by the extra excitement of JB's hymn descants for a Sunday Matins. His standards were high and demanding, but by the mid 1960s the Lay clerks' desks could attract the like of Alistair Hume and Tony Holt long before Kings Singers days. Richard Seal was there, too, as another mentor with the same enthusiasm for the cultivation of that 'Chichester Sound' which Sarah Baldock and her team still cultivate today. RIP JB.

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                      #25
                      Yes, RIP JB. I was privileged to be present at a number of evensongs in the mid '60s, when Richard Seal was JB's deputy. On my first visit I was struck by the intimacy of the choir (both in the building and foundation sense, the latter comprising 14 boys and 6 lay clerks). On that occasion I remember being 'blown away' by the exceedingly slow recitation of the psalms, coupled with their musicality, which seemed to enhance even more the beauty of their language. I shall ever be grateful to JB and RS, and indeed the whole cathedral foundation, for the pleasant memories of the devotional and musical experiences of those times which were second to none.

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                        #26
                        Brief reminder that the repeat today is complete.

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                          #27
                          An excellent obit. of Dr Birch has just appeared in the Telegraph

                          John Birch, who has died aged 82, was director of music at Chichester Cathedral for 22 years, conducting the British premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, re-establishing the Southern Cathedrals Festival, and serving as musical adviser to the new Chichester Festival Theatre.

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                            #28
                            Originally posted by moeranbiogman View Post
                            An excellent obit. of Dr Birch has just appeared in the Telegraph

                            http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obit...ohn-Birch.html
                            An excellent photograph (taken recently in his sitting room in the apartment in one part of the medieval Chantry in Chichester), with an easily-spotted inaccuracy in the text:

                            'He [John Birch] also gave the first performance of Herbert Howells’s Fourth Rhapsody at Westminster Abbey in 1968 and, in 1972, composed a Partita for Edward Heath, the piano-playing Prime Minister.'

                            Of course, Howells wrote his Partita for the music-loving Prime Minister, who then asked John Birch to give its first performance, affairs of state presumably having altered Heath's organ practice timetable. A less generous interpretation of events might claim that the PM simply found the piece too difficult to play in public. Somehow, I can imagine the scene in the flat at No.10, with Bach's 48 placed open at its first pages on the clavichord (or the Steinway).

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                              #29
                              Originally posted by Keraulophone View Post
                              [...] with an easily-spotted inaccuracy in the text...
                              To which should be added the misspelling of Christopher Dearnley's surname.

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                                #30
                                Originally posted by pole_2_pole View Post
                                Board members will be saddened to hear of the death of Dr John Birch (DoM at Chichester from 1958 - 1980) today after having suffered a large stroke a few days ago. RIP.
                                Thankl you for bringing this to our attentiomn pole2pole. I live not too far away from Chichester and and this has saddened me. He was a veryh important man in the history of this great Cathedral.
                                Don’t cry for me
                                I go where music was born

                                J S Bach 1685-1750

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