h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Have just returned from a weekend rehearsing the St. John's Passion. It was very hard work, especially as I hadn't sung it for some 40 years, and hadn't had the time to prepare as well as I intended. But it was a lovely four days in a retreat in the beautiful town of Rastatt.

This is the third time I will have sung with this choir - we did the Rossini "Petite messe Solonelle" and the St. Mark's Passion by Reinhard Keiser. Other events I had to skip because of various family obligations.

The performance is on 12th March in this church:



http://www.looking-at-germany.com/master/deutsch/orte-alphabet/orte-s-s/speyer/st-josef-kirche-001/st-josef-kirche-002.html

The architecture in those photos reminds me of a church I sang in when I was in Latvia.

Do you get a gamba to play "Es ist vollbracht"?

I'm waiting to see on the Gamba issue. We watched a film one evening, a dramatised version of the whole work, filmed in our Speyer Cathedral. They had moved all the furniture and used the whole space - must have been quite a feat.

Anyway, I thought of you, as the "Es ist vollbracht" part was filmed as close-ups of the soloist and just the hands and bow of the gamba player. (It wasn't till the credits at the end that you learned that it had been a woman playing the gamba - that's how close-up it was!)

This was probably because, although the filming was done in Speyer, the sound was recorded in Munich!

The ensemble accompanying us are called "L'arpa festante". They don't have a web site. Their English language Wiki page is longer than the German one, but that doesn't list the instruments or the instrumentalists. But as they only play on "historical instruments" it will definitely be a gamba. One of the altos was very disappointed that we would not be having a bass bassoon (which I can only guess is the English for "Contrafagott") - but we were told it would be too expensive.

It's 165 miles from Munich to Speyer. How loudly did they have to play?

Strange that someone would charge extra for playing double bassoon. I reckon the union rules say it must be a different player.

The concert was last night (one performance only!) I'm pretty sure that was a bona fide gamba, Recumbentman. The soloists were the same as we had before to a great extent. Really nice people (I ended up sitting at the same table when we went for a pizza afterwards).

All the tunes have been going through my head all day.



The next project is an ecumenical service at Whitsun. Speyer was one of the centres of the reformation - being just up the road from Worms and all that. (I probably wrote a journal about it once.)

2017 is a huge commemorative year for the Reformation, coming paradoxically at a time when the churches are growing together again (with diminishing congregations, it's their only hope).

There is a very strong Catholic and a very strong Protestant community centred on Speyer, and many events are shared - in May they have an "organ walk" where you can start at one end of the town and hear organ recitals in various churches of each denomination, one after the other, proceeding to the Cathedral for the final session. They have also had various other happenings - not all around Church Music.

Anyway - not only a select few, but the whole country gets 31 October off this year - Reformation Day. That's really great for the Catholic states - we have 1 November for All Saints, anyway, so we get a very long weekend!

"The bells at Speyer" has long been a favorite of mine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TTJ12FjBBU

Congratulations! You couldn't mistake the etherial magisterial sound of a gamba for anything else, in fairness.

I'm re-reading (never finished it on my first attempt) the Diarmaid McCulloch book "Reformation". Amazing period in history.

The idea of the churches coming back together is almost unthinkable. Nonetheless, there is a tiny precedent: when Baden Powell's Boy Scouts started up, they were non-denominational, and both Catholics and Protestants joined. My aunts and father had lifelong friends that they had met through scouting and that they would never have met otherwise, coming from the separated denominations. That was in the twenties.

Pretty soon the Catholic Church said "Down with this sort of thing" and they founded the Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland, in 1927. But lo I tell unto you a mystery: in 1988 the two branches started talking and in 2004 they ...


merged. Who'd a thunk it.

That's good news!