Help please: The Grange Care Home Ben is leading a service/reflection and sing on Monday 31st July at 10.30am and would love a singer/ or musician or two to join him…? This is the first time we have been welcomed in for a long time. Please pray for this.
Our benefice service at the end of the month is a Songs of Praise service It is good to sing together. It cheers the soul to be thankful and be united in praise.
With over 50 very talented singers, all graduates, current students or music staff at Delaware University this is a very large and very accomplished choir. They performed a varied mixture of modern and traditional pieces. They opened with Seek him that Maketh the Seven Stars by Jonathon Dove, an uplifting modern setting of Psalm 139. The second piece was the lovely Os Justi by Anton Bruckner. They then continued with a ten minute sequence comprising of a mixture of pieces, Against Jealously by Irving Fine, the Welsh traditional lullaby Suo Gan arranged by Paul Mealor, Alleluia Azania by Sabelo Mthembu and There was an old woman by Goffredo Petrassi. I loved the Mthembu piece, it was very moving and included a section in one of the Khoisan based ‘clicking’ languages from Zimbabwe. This was followed by devotional music with Paul Mealor’s Stabat Mater and the Sanctus and Agnus Dei from William Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices. After this they performed Morten Lauridsen’s set of Nocturnes, sung in French, English and Italian. Then they presented another sequence, this time of gospel and spiritual music, Cedric Dent’s very exciting arrangement of He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands, Even me by Michael Reid, Soon I will be done by Marques Garrett and My Lord what a Mourning by William L Dawson, an arrangement of ‘When the stars begin to fall’.
We are asked to pray