Sunday choral service of psalms, canticles, hymns and prayers sung by the Chester Cathedral choir.
Choral Evensong is on at Chester Cathedral this Sunday, 1 November, from 15:00 to 16:00. It's a service of psalms, canticles, hymns and prayers, with the Chester Cathedral Choir taking the lead. If you've never been, it's a good place to start with the cathedral's daily worship: the Liturgy of the Word woven with canticles that act as a response of praise, followed by intercessory prayer.
The choir sings eight choral services a week, shared between the boy and girl choristers and the lay clerks. The music they work through runs from the fourteenth century to the present, and they perform commissions from composers like Anthony Piccolo, Philip Moore, Howard Skempton, Francis Pott, Matthew Martin and Charlotte Bray. There's also the Cathedral Nave Choir, founded on Advent Sunday 1867, which is the longest-running voluntary choir in the country.
The cathedral itself—the Cathedral of St Werburgh and the Blessed Virgin Mary—traces its origins to a church founded in 660 AD, and the current building dates from 1868. The daily worship follows the same rhythm as the cathedral's Benedictine predecessors at St Werburgh's Abbey. It's also a place that's looking forward: the cathedral aims to be carbon neutral by 2030 and stopped printing one-off documents in 2019, so you'll see service notes on large screens instead of holding a printed sheet.
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If Sunday doesn't work, there are other times to catch it. Evensong runs Monday to Friday from 17:30 to 18:15—though on Wednesdays and during school holidays it's a Said Evening Prayer—and there's a 16:15 service on Saturdays. This Sunday's is 15:00 to 16:00.
