CE Priory Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, London [L] 22.3.23

[DracoM]

CE Priory Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, London [L] 22.3.23
The 900th anniversary of the foundation of the church and St Bart’s Hospital


Order of Service:


Introit: This Spiritual House (Brian Brockless)
Responses: Joanna Forbes L’Estrange
Psalms 108, 109 (Hollins, Morley)
First Lesson: Jeremiah 13: 20-27
Office hymn: Christ is our cornerstone (Harewood)
Canticles: The Great Service (Tomkins)
Second Lesson: 1 Peter 1 v.17 – 2 v.3
Anthem: God is here (John Rutter) (world premiere)
Hymn: Thy hand, O God, has guided (Thornbury)

Voluntary: Fugue sur le nom d’Alain, Op. 7 (Duruflé)

James Norrey (Organist)
Rupert Gough (Director of Music)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001k1dv

[ardcarp]

Good to have another live service. There does seem to be a preponderance of London Churches and Oxbridge Colleges of late. Isn't it time good old provincial cathedrals got a bigger representation on CE?

Rupert Gough also does the Chapel music at Royal Holloway, I think. I wonder if there's any 'cross-over' among the singers?

[DracoM]

Reminder: today @ 4 p.m.

[Guest]

That's 3 live broadcasts in a row I've had to miss!!

[jonfan]

I was very much enjoying this service until a power failure (strong unison singing in the final hymn without an organ - bravo). There was some very classy singing with attractive repertoire. Always a big occasion when there’s a Rutter first performance; typical strong and effective word setting, homophonic rather than melodic.

[mopsus]

I was very much enjoying this service until a power failure (strong unison singing in the final hymn without an organ - bravo). There was some very classy singing with attractive repertoire. Always a big occasion when there’s a Rutter first performance; typical strong and effective word setting, homophonic rather than melodic.

The cynic in me wonders whether this and the problems in the live relay from St David's 3 weeks ago will be used as a justification for fewer and fewer live CE broadcasts. But the problem clearly wasn't just with the relay equipment because it took out the organ as well. Perhaps they will re-record the end of the service for Sunday's repeat (as happened for the organ voluntary in a broadcast from St Pancras a few years ago because of external noise during the live broadcast).

[cat]

Today's problem was a power cut affecting the whole neighbourhood, so entirely outside their control.

[ardcarp]

Odd that it went off, came back sans organ and then went off again. Do the BBC techies have some reserve power for such incidents?

[DracoM]

[Magister Chori]

The complete service is now available on BBC Sounds.

[ardcarp]

I have listened to the whole CE again, to which the BBC have obviously re-recorded the final hymn and the Durufle organ voluntary.
Leaving aside the technical glitches, I must agree with jonfan (post #5) that it was really classy singing and excellent direction. I enjoyed it even more second time through!

[Roger Judd]

I wonder whether anyone here has inside information. My guess is that the BBC recorded the run-through / rehearsal before the service, and have used that to patch the broadcast.
RJ

[Nicholas]

I wonder whether anyone here has inside information. My guess is that the BBC recorded the run-through / rehearsal before the service, and have used that to patch the broadcast.
RJ

Bit late to this party, but we're still celebrating the 900th Anniversary at St Bart's the Great, including with a ten-day music festival that starts tomorrow evening. So, it's still a live subject...

Here's the inside info on what happened to the broadcast. During the last hymn, the power started to fail: first of all in the ambulatory and, either simultaneously or shortly thereafter, the organ also went off. A few moments later, the main lighting went out. Last to go was the South Vestry, which was being used as the local BBC Control Room. The team in there was pretty perplexed, because they heard the organ stop playing, but the congregation continue to sing, but had no idea what was causing it, until they too lost power, after which the link to Broadcasting House finally went down. The cascade failure was a puzzle until we discovered that the whole area around the church had lost power, but that it had happened in sections, presumably as individual bits of external power technology shut down in sequence. The church's electrical system has been built up in layers over the past decades, and there are several separate feeds into the building that are connected to different external power zones around it. So, as these zones went down in turn, so did the relevant area in the church. So, it took some time to lose the whole thing and, as luck would have it, the BBC in the South Vestry were connected to the last connected zone to be affected.

The power wasn't off that long, in fact, and came back on maybe 5 minutes later. So the congregation was asked to sing the hymn again once the systems had rebooted and then listen to the organ Postlude as it was recorded, with both being stitched into the recording for the repeat. As it so happened, the version affected by the power cut was on iPlayer for some time, so we downloaded it as an historical record of what happened.

Just to try your patience a little longer: this technical failure came on top of a series of similar problems with technologies of various kinds. As autumnal weather came into its own towards the end of 2022, the heating came on and promptly blew up. An array of issues (a very long and rather silly story) prevented its replacement until the spring weather was truly established in 2023, so we spent the entire winter season, including Christmas and our many, many carol services, in a freezing cold church that certainly took us back 900 years. Meantime, just before the actual 900th Anniversary of the foundation stone being laid on the Feast of the Annunciation (25th March - old New Year's Day - although ironically not in 1123, which was in the middle of a fairly short period when the Normans moved it to January 1st, although it fairly soon returned to 25th March until the early 1750s), one of our livestreaming cameras for no apparent reason more or less leapt from where it was affixed to a cast iron screen and smashed to smithereens. Then water came in through the roof of the extension block where toilets, the sacristy and various other things are located, and all the overhead electrics in that zone blew and are still off, because we haven't yet been able to solve the water ingress problems. It is rather as though St Bartholomew is making us remember what most of the past nine centuries were like without the benefit of technology! Choral Evensong has very much fitted into this narrative as a particularly high profile attack on our cosy modern ways!

[Pulcinella]

A little like what happened in the live broadcast from York on 6 June 2018, and the remedies they took then:

https://www.for3.org/forums/forum/classical-forum/the-choir/18205-ce-york-minster-6-vi-2018-l/page2