13 | January | 2014 | Chronicles of an Anglo Swiss

Click over to whatever website you visit most frequently to get news. Find the third headline on the page. Make sure that headline is in your post.

Photographers, artists, poets: show us a CURRENT EVENT.

St. Urs Cathedral, Solothurn (19)

I decided to spice up this report and have included some of my own comments in italic print.

Der Solothurner Domchor blickt auf ein erfolgreiches Jahr zurück – tranlsation is The Solothurn Cathedral Choir reflects on a successful Year.

We have a cathedral in Solothurn, the town being the seat of the Bishop of Basel who presides over Solothurn. Probably he found it a nicer place to have his house as in Basel which is a border town and having a lot of traffic. I am not in the catholic club, but the Kanton (State) of Solothurn is, very much so. Mr. Swiss is Swiss Reform Church.

So according to the rules of the daily challenge I visited the Solothurner Zeitung (our local newspaper) and chose the third headline and this was the result. I did not even realise that our local cathedral had a choir, although I knew that it had a boy’s choir, my youngest offspring singing with them until his voice broke. At least he discovered a few good Bach songs and toured a few places with the choir. He even saw Pope John Paul in Rome travelling around on his Papamobile as we call it.

The report begins: “Our cathedral choir had a successful year, big deal. So I decided to read further (please note I am doing a rough translation from the original German text).

The effort to bind different generations, regions and musical styles to a complete work was completed – did they turn a Bach Oratorio into a “Jesus Christ Superstar” similar event? I do not remember this happening. A further highlight was saying goodbye to town priest X and the inauguration of the new Priest administrator Y. I hope that mobbing was not practiced to accomplish this. Who knows, perhaps they were glad to see the back of him, his sermons being boring and sending the onlookers to sleep.

The music programme for 2014 is manifold. Last Easter we succeeded in presenting the B Minor Mass by Franz Schubert and the Halleluja from G.F.Händel and at Whitsun the festival service for the confirmations was surrounded by contemporary anglo saxon songs. Probably singing Greensleeves in German – Grüne Aermal – no I do not think so.

A higher weight was laid on the choral songs. The roots of these songs go back to the seventh century and find today more significance and increasing appreciation.

With a singalong (my own translation, but with the same meaning I think) project the cathedral choir gives the opportunity to singers to get nearer to this impressive spiritual music (not really my sort of thing). To finalise the cathedral choir year we managed to sing the “Missa Pastoralis” at Christmas from Casimir Meister (one of our local composers it seems that wrote a few hit songs during the 19^th-20^th century. They were quite popular in the church hit parade of the time). This word had a very special connection to the cathedral choir as Casimir Meister was himself in the 1920’s band master (honest, that was the translation I found) and he composed this Mass in 1927 for the 50^th birthday of the cathedral choir.

The cathedral choir will be presenting more concerts and performances this year.

The statutes showed no surprises. Everyone stays where they are. We have a new treasurer (did the last one disappear with the money?).

The canon has now been appointed an honorary member.

So that’s it. As you can see we are surrounded by exciting and news breaking moments in our local town.

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