November evensong

At our evensong service this coming Saturday 4 November at 5pm we will be singing Herbert Brewer’s Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in D.

Brewer composed this setting in 1927 for the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford Cathedral. The photos are from our most recent UK choir tour, when we sang evensong in Hereford on 29 December 2022. We will always remember Hereford both for the warmth of the welcome we received and for the Cathedral’s special acoustic.

A surprising thing about singing evensong in large cathedrals is that because the congregation sits with you in the choir stalls, it is actually quite an intimate affair, acoustically speaking – much like it is at Pilgrim. Of course you are aware of the sound echoing around far away in the vast expanse of the building, but it seems distant and detached. In some smaller cathedrals, though, the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ acoustics connect – to glorious effect. Hereford was one of those places where the acoustic just seemed to envelop us and support us throughout the service. We’ll never forget singing the very first response at the start of our rehearsal there – and gasping in delight at the sound that seemed to float in the air around us for seconds after we stopped singing.