In previous years, our music lists have been published quarterly. In 2018, we’re publishing bimonthly to afford us a little bit more flexibility in terms of voicings but also to provide space on the list itself for information about our Forrest-Heyther Partbooks project as it unfolds.

It made sense to include the Sundays of Lent on the first music list of the year, so this list in fact covers little more than a month, with the services of the Easter Triduum being the main focus. John Norman’s unrecorded Missa Resurrexit Dominus is our first mass of the project and will function as a test edition; how different will it be to sing this music (some of which is fiendishly complex) in original note values without barlines rather than the quartered note values of EECM?

Beyond FH, Eastertide sees us return to a few double choir favourites in Hassler’s Missa octo vocum and Croce’s Regina cæli, a work which works wonderfully when the triple time Alleluias are interpolated as instrumental ritonelli. The Regina cæli appears in a different guise as the Christ-centred contrafactum Rex Christe omnes by Michael Prætorius, as well as instrumentally in organ voluntaries by Lassus (motet arrangement by Liszt) and Peeter Cornet. The Regina cæli is only sung during Eastertide, so we have to make the most of it!