VERO BEACH – On Sunday, March 16, at 4p.m., the Trinity Episcopal Choir will offer a Service of Choral Evensong. Organist & Choirmaster Dr. Jason Hobratschk will direct the Trinity St. Cecilia Choir and serve as recital organist.
Donald Ingram, Trinity Organist and Choirmaster Emeritus will serve as the service organist.
Choral Evensong is one of the oldest and most exquisite services in the Anglican-Episcopal tradition, codified in the first Book of Common Prayer of 1549.
The Service incorporates elements of the daily monastic offices of Vespers, sung at sunset, and Compline, sung before retiring.
Evensong is almost entirely sung throughout, and the service does not include a sermon or homily. Among the musical highlights of Evensong are one or more Psalms set to Anglican Chant, a style of singing particular to Anglicanism; a “Service,” a setting of the Magnificat (the Canticle of Mary, Luke 1:46-55) and Nunc Dimittis (the Canticle of Simeon, Luke 2:29-32); congregational hymns; and choral anthems.
For this Evensong, the Trinity St. Cecilia Choir will sing the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in B minor of T. Tertius Noble.
English-born Noble was organist and choirmaster at Ely Cathedral (1892-1898) and York Minster (1898-1913). From 1913 to 1943, Noble was Organist and Choirmaster at St. Thomas Episcopal Church (Fifth Avenue) in New York, where he founded the renowned St. Thomas Choir School in 1919.
The choir will also sing Anglican chant and two anthems, Herbert Sumsion’s “They that go down to the sea in ships,” and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “O how amiable.”
The service is preceded by a half-hour organ recital played by Dr. Hobratschk on Trinity’s magnificent pipe organ, built by the firm of Harrison & Harrison of Durham, England in 1997.
The recital will include organ works by German Baroque composer Vincent Lübeck, English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, and 20th-century English composer Herbert Howells, whose Master Tallis’s Testament, written in homage to his countryman.
A freewill offering will benefit the Music Program of Trinity Episcopal Church.