It's great to know that up and down the country, cathedrals are put to use for lunchtime concerts while some fondly imagine that evgeryone is at work. There are plenty of retired, students and tourists to fill an exquisite space with an audience for fine music.I wouldn't take Winchester's advertisement that their concerts are free with a retiring collection quite at face value because I don't think you can get into the building without a seven pound fifty ticket but, having been to St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Chichester and Portsmouth Cathedrals, I haven't yet heard anything better than Index Cantorum and so it was well worth it on this occasion.
I'm not sure how much the group are a regular choir or if they are brought together only for specific performances under Director Mark Williams. They could be a scratch Tallis Scholars, a few more in number but making a similarly wonderful sound.
On the theme of Angels, the programme was ostensibly half Renaissance/baroque and half Romantic/modern. If it seemed as if two items each from Tomas Luis de Victoria and Juan de Esquival Barahona, 1560-c1625 and new to me, I think) had set a sufficiently high standard, all beautifully clear and as nearly intricate in their filigree as the magnificent architecture they were in front of, then that was before the tenors, keyboard and chittarone (not a theorbo) of the Duo Seraphim from the Monteverdi 1610 Vespers. Simon Lillystone and Peter McGreary, augmented by Mark Williams himself, gave a memorable account of this ethereal, trembling masterpiece, one of many seismic pieces in Monteverdi's seminal magnum opus.
Through Brahms and Tchaikovsky, they arrived at James MacMillan's A Child's Prayer, written for the victims of the Dunblane school massacre. As such, it belongs with John Tavener's Song for Athene as a deeply moving elegy and here Karen Williams (yes, apparently, some relation - daughter) and another soprano whose name I can't deduce from the personnel listing, extended into sublime reaches to produce a thrilling performance. If one doesn't need to be in work then a lunchtime treat of Monteverdi and MacMillan is exactly where I'd want to be, and I was glad that's where I was.
Only three rows from the choir, I wasn't far from being almost inside the music and no recording of whatever quality could reproduce the sound, which also bears witness to the wonderful individual voices within the overall balance of the performance.
I was probably lucky to be able to visit this week because I can't believe it's this good every time. Whereas the audience at Chichester are in place long before the start and one needs to get there early, this was merely comfortably full and arriving 15 minutes before the 1 p.m. start should be fine. Your entrance money to the cathedral lasts a year and so if you are local you will get more than your money's worth. I had mine in just this one concert.