Evensong BBC Radio 3 - 24/8/05

It is not easy to get information on Edington Priory Church, Wiltshire, but I think this is the church that is referred to. The service of choral evensong this Wednesday was very choral, indeed. Only the final hymn could be sung by the congregation, and everything except this hymn and the voluntary were a capella (choir only). The introit, the office hymn and the anthem had Latin words, which can be too much considering the spirit of the Anglican Church. I did not quite catch the words of the very contemporary magnificat and nunc dimittis, so they might have been latin too. Maybe the narrow bandwidth on the internet broadcast made the diction so poor that I could not hear what they were singing. Being a part of the Festival of Music within the Liturgy, I presume they made a point of presenting diverse and less known music, and also using music as much as possible throughout the service. Unfortunately this evensong put a too large of a barrier between the word of God and the congregation due to the Latin language that nobody understands. In my opinion there should only be one piece of music with Latin words in a service, if anything at all. The musical content may just as well please our senses of hearing while we are gathered in church, but the choralevensong is, and has always been, a service of God.