Choir Tour to New York and Boston
Forty-five members of the College Choir toured and sang in New York and Boston this April in a series of concerts and services under the leadership of Tim Garrard and Tim Johnson. These included Solemn Evensong and Benediction at St Mary the Virgin, just off Time’s Square in New York, Compline at Harvard University and the Palm Sunday Service at the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston.
The repertoire included the 4th and 5th Movements from Brahms German Requiem, Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, Duruflé’s Tantum Ergo and Ubi Caritas as well as English works by Gibbons, Purcell, Stanford and Leighton.
The Palm Sunday service was a packed and solemn service, yet at the end the congregation rose and applauded the Choir. The reception at the previous day’s concert at St Anthony’s Shrine, where the choir sang twelve pieces from the repertoire, was inspiring: you could see from the audience’s faces that they were moved by the spirituality of the singing. For the Choir, the most moving concert was at St Paul’s Chapel, New York, close to Ground Zero. Here fire fighters had come for rest during their struggles with the Twin Towers inferno, and it has become a shrine to their memory. So when we sang Leighton’s Set me as a seal, the repeated words, Love is strong as death were particularly poignant.
Singing together creates a wonderful sense of rapport, but so too did the fun and high spirits of everyone in the choir and the charismatic and amusing leadership of Mr Garrard. We took a boat trip around Manhattan, went to the top of the Empire State Building lat at night and ate voraciously at Quincy’s Market, Boston. Add to that we had the wackiest, funniest tour guide in the world. The tour will live for ever in everyone’s memories.
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