St Botolph's Patronal Festival Choral Evensong

22nd June 2025 at 6pm

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There is a Patronal Choral Evensong to celebrate the life of St Botolph, the patron saint of our Norman church on an ancient path. 

 

Saint Botolph's day is set as 17th June and many a riotous fair was held in June in the parish in the distant past until rumours of bad behaviour put a stop to this. We now focus on having a celebratory festival service. This year we are having an Evensong service. 

We have received a grant from the Evensong Trust to enable us to celebrate this festival with an organist and our homegrown choir and to help us promote the service throughout the parish and benefice. 

There has been a choir at St Botolph's for the past 30 years, an informal group of people singing in four parts of varied ages and backgrounds, and we have become a close knit community.  We are premiering a new setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis by Glynne Stackhouse, our festival organist. We asked him to suggest some settings of the two evensong staples and he came up with not one but two alternatives composed by his fair hands. 

The choir feels very honoured and really delighted to have new pieces to sing, and are doing our utmost to rise to this challenge. Glynne wrote the following:

 

Setting the Evensong Canticles for Swyncombe Church

 

'Though not the regular organist at St Botolph’s Church, Swyncombe, I’ve played for a number of services of various kinds there, and have always admired how this remote little church, with hardly any resident population, attracts a good congregation and a capable choir.  After I’d played for Evensong there in February, the choir co-ordinator, Felicity Bazell, asked me to suggest some possible settings of the Evensong Canticles that they could learn for the patronal festival in June. There are so many to choose from, but being over-ambitious and selecting any of the grander, cathedral-scale settings would probably have presented the choir, keen as it is, with too great a challenge.  So I suggested several more modest settings by well-known composers, and then thought, “I know this church and choir very well – and the organ – so let me see if I can write something for them.”  Without consulting Felicity, I set to work with several guidelines in mind: melodiousness and enjoyability for both singers and congregation, no excessive technical difficulty or vocal range but musical interest and a degree of challenge that would be satisfying to meet, and of course expressing both the celebratory nature of a patronal festival and the deeper significance of the words of the two Canticles.  I was delighted when, after trying my various suggestions out and my own offering, the choir voted to sing Stackhouse in G!

 

To what extent I succeeded in achieving all of this, the choir, congregation and clergy are invited to tell me after they have heard the result!'

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Please note there will be no morning service on the 22nd of June