First time ever - Part 3

Yesterday, over the noon hour, I played for the third of this year's Lenten Communion services put on by the Winnipeg Centre, Royal Canadian College of Organists. This year the series is being held at St. Andrew's Anglican Church (Woodhaven). Each participating organist makes their own repertoire selections for the half hour service and all of mine were based on hymns - some more familiar than others. The hymn that falls into the 'first time ever' category is ABERYSTWYTH, a beautiful tune of Welsh origin. The only text I believe it is ever paired with is by Charles Wesley, Jesus, Lover of my Soul.

The first time I ever remember hearing this hymn was when the choir from Canadian Nazarene College came to sing in Orkney church. I think it may have been 1971 during their spring tour of eastern Canada. I seem to recall it being sung a cappella; maybe one of my sisters will remember for sure. It's probably safe to say that the music that stays with us (especially for 40 years!) is connected to us in more than one way. I may not have remembered this hymn and the first time I heard it except that my parents taped the evening's concert on a new radio/cassette player we had with a built in mic. That tape was replayed often and the hymn remained with me. If you can ignore the lip syncing, you can hear Aled Jones singing Jesus, Lover of my Soul by going to this link. The second verse is sung in Welsh.

You can have all this world...

"How Sweet the Sound!" is already more than a week ago; how time flies! The concert went well and I really enjoyed working with professional singers again. It's been awhile since I could just sit down and play and not do the coaching side of it as well. Definitely a treat for me. :) I usually find that there are one or two songs, sometimes more, that stay in my head for a few days after a performance. This time one of them was the spiritual "Give me Jesus". In my opinion, music and text are perfectly wed to create a song filled with emotion and the spiritual longing to desire only Christ in all I do.

This performance is not the arrangement we did, but it captures the essence of the song very well.

Go Down, Moses!

These March days are full of preparations for an upcoming concert (details above) and once again, I found myself dreaming the music last night. You guessed it - the piece was "Go Down, Moses!" This is one of the selections I am collaborating with Encore Vocal Quartet to perform in 2 weeks' time. In my dream, I seemed to be playing the song from finish to start - a technique sometimes recommended to really know your stuff. To make things even stranger, the music was laid out on a long banquet table...? I didn't think I went to bed hungry, but then dreams come from weird places sometimes.

All dreaming aside, the evening promises to provide great entertainment and hopefully some inspiration to get us through the rest of our long, cold, windy winter in Winnipeg. (Temperature at 8 a.m. today was -27C.) Good thing one of the solo songs I'm playing is "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen"!