The King's Singers

23 / 07 / 2010

Chris

I think I shall name this summer "the summer of hot KS tours." Asia is always warm when we tour there, and the last few weeks were no exception, but Europe? Quite often hovering between gloomy and damp. Not this week, though. We've seen temperatures of up to 35 degrees on our travels through the beautiful mountains of Austria and Germany, especially yesterday as we drove up from Carinthia in southern Austria all the way up to Bayern in southern Germany. On the way we pass through some pretty long tunnels and like to play the KS tunnel game - each person in the car guesses by how many degrees the temperature will rise (in winter) or fall (in summer) inside the tunnel. The longer the tunnel, the greater the change. You're right, it probably is as boring as it sounds, but on a 5-hour journey it does help, especially if the alternative is listening to one of your colleagues telling you a story you've already heard a hundred times over the past few years.

Actually, that's not a bad idea: stories, please. We need a way to while away the hours in cars, and we all know pretty much everything there is to know about each other, so we need made-up stories to make our lives sound more exciting. You know, the time one of us wrestled a bear to save a stranded baby in the woods, that sort of thing.

Tomorrow we sing an incredible programme of church music in Weimar, including Thomas Tallis' wonderful setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Since I was a choral scholar I have loved these pieces deeply - they are perhaps the height of English Renaissance composition - and singing them one to a part with the KS is something I always look forward to.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, return unto the Lord thy God. Gets me every time.