CANTORUM CHOIR & ORCHESTRA. Inspiring Voices Giving Pleasure Cookham s Chamber Choir. All Creatures. Great. Small! MUSICAL DIRECTOR ELISABETH TOYE

Transcription

1 1.50 CANTORUM CHOIR & ORCHESTRA Inspiring Voices Giving Pleasure Cookham s Chamber Choir All Creatures Great & Small! MUSICAL DIRECTOR ELISABETH TOYE Saturday 23rd June 7:30 pm Holy Trinity Church Cookham

2 CANTORUM CHOIR antorum Choir is a lively, committed choir of approximately forty C mixed voices. We are based in Cookham, Berkshire, and draw our membership from a wide sector of the Thames Valley. Founded nearly thirty years ago, the choir has built up a reputation as one of the leading chamber choirs in the area, mixing high standards with a warm and friendly social life. We have undertaken several European tours and appeared a number of times on television and in films, notably in the first of the Inspector Morse adaptations. Earlier this year, we appeared with the Brit Award-winning singing group Blake. Currently, we give four or five concerts per year, at least one of them orchestral. Sopranos Julia Bentley Dawkes, Dawn Dearing Rachel Harrison, Kirsty Kinge Julia Millard, Hilary Monaghan Valerie Snapes, Marianne Stork Joy Strzelecki, Eleanor Vale Pippa Wallace, Joanna Yates Tenors William Branston, David Hazeldine Philip Martineau, Malcolm Stork John Timewell Altos Bridget Bentley, Jill Burton Jami Castell, Sarah Evans Anne Glover, Joanna Henwood Chiu Sung, Lorna Sykes Anna Trocmé Latter Basses Derek Beaven, John Buck Arthur Creswell, Gordon Donkin Charles Luxford, Paul Seddon Inspiring Voices Giving Pleasure Cookham s Chamber Choir 2

3 Elisabeth Toye (Musical Director) Elisabeth is a graduate of Birmingham University and the Royal Academy of Music, where she won the 2004 Michael Head Prize for English Song and the 2005 Arthur Bliss Prize for twentieth Century music. In 2008, she won the A.E.S.S. Patricia Routledge National Prize for English Song and has subsequently built a busy and successful career as a professional soprano, vocal coach, and choral trainer. She has for some years been working with Berkshire Maestros (The Young Musicians Trust) and is currently Director of Berkshire Young Voices and Director of the Royal Borough Children s Choir. In addition, Elisabeth has tutored for the National Youth Choir of Wales and, in 2008, worked alongside the Director of The National Youth Choirs of Great Britain. Jozef Janik (Piano) Jozef has a BA in music from Zilina Conservatoire, a Postgraduate Diploma and an MA in Music from the Royal Academy. He has given concerts in many countries, and is a recipient of several prizes, including First prize in the International Piano Competition in Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. In this country he has performed piano concertos by Mozart, Rachmaninov, Ravel and Bach and in 2012 he will be performing Concerto in D minor by J.S. Bach at St. James Piccadilly and Schumann and Beethoven Concertos with Dartford Symphony. Programme Notes Almost everyone has heard of Aesop s Fables. Aesop, allegedly a slave in Ancient Greece during the sixth century BC, wrote over six hundred of these little storieswith-a-moral, which often involve animals. Bob Chilcott, formerly of The King s Singers and now an acclaimed composer in his own right, has devoted his life to inspiring choral music worldwide. Here, he has chosen to set five of the best known fables for choir and piano. We see in these witty, jazz-inspired pieces the bouncy and overconfident hare setting off brightly but then going to sleep; the mountain straining over nothing; the petulant little fox and her sour grapes; the battle between the north wind and the sun, with the women and men in the choir pointing up the conflict; and finally the tribute to music itself when the swan, mistakenly caught for the table instead of the goose, eventually sings to save his life. Chilcott describes in his own programme notes how he underpinned this last piece with a wonderful harmonic progression taken from Du bist die Ruh by the king of all songwriters, Franz Schubert. (Programme notes continue on P6) 3

4 Aesop s Fables Bob Chilcott i. The Hare and the Tortoise ii. The Mountain in Labour iii. The Fox and the Grapes iv. The North Wind and the Sun v. The Goose and the Swan The Lamb & The Tyger John Tavener Piano Music: The Flying Circus Jozef Janik Piano The Silver Swan Orlando Gibbons The Blue Bird Charles Stanford Little Horses Aaron Copland Contraponto Bestiale (Animal Counterpoint) Adriano Banchieri INTERVAL 4

5 Caneuon Gwerin y Tri Aderyn (Folk songs of the three birds) Arr. Jeffrey Howard i. Y Gwcw fach (The dear cuckoo Cuckoo, dear ) ii. Ble r ei di? (Where are you going... little bird?) Soprano solo: Eleanor Vale; Tenor solo: William Branston iii. Tiwn Sol Ffa (Sol-Fa Tune... as birdsong in Spring) Y Gylfinir (The Curlew) Arr. Dilys Elwyn-Edwards & I bought me a Cat Aaron Copland Tenor solos: William Branston The Spider and the Fly Arr. Seymour Smith Soprano solo: Kirsty Kinge; Tenor solo: William Branston Animal Crackers Volume 1 Eric Whitacre i. The Panther ii. The Cow iii. The Firefly Animal Crackers Volume 2 Eric Whitacre i. The Canary ii. The Eel iii. The Kangaroo Piano accompanist Jozef Janik 5

6 Programme Notes (continued) John Tavener made this now very famous setting of The Lamb one afternoon in 1982 for his son Simon s third birthday. The poem is from William Blake s Songs of Innocence in which a number of icons (painted by Blake himself) of childhood, innocence and the un-fallen world are evoked. Tavener s musical lines are full of palindromic shapes or perfect reflections: in other words, the musical score in several places can literally be folded over to match up with itself. Tavener s setting of The Tyger was made in Greece for the 65th birthday of Philip Sherrard, a British philosopher with whom he shared an interest in Greek Orthodox art, music and theology. The poem is from Blake s Songs of Experience, which complement and parallel those of Innocence with the eye of worldly knowledge. Tavener s concern to create in music the visual power of Greek or Russian religious icons leads him to the deep bass notes and thrilling clashes and resonances of the eastern church choirs. In these he captures the fearful symmetry, the dread grasp and deadly terrors of the tyger. Did he who made the lamb make thee? The Silver Swan, by Orlando Gibbons ( ), is perhaps the best known and best loved English madrigal. Of course, it picks up on the theme of the swan who sang at the end of the Chilcott Fable. But Liz has paired it here with another very famous piece inspired by a bird. The Blue Bird was published in 1910 by Charles Villiers Stanford ( ), one of the great names of British music from the Victorian and Edwardian era. Together with All in the April Evening, The Blue Bird gained a kind of national prominence following an early recording by the celebrated Glasgow Orpheus Choir under Sir Hugh Roberton. The first half closes with Little Horses, one of two Appalachian songs tonight by the American composer Aaron Copland ( ). This is a simple lullaby that we added to our repertoire two years ago in our Notes from America concert. And that s followed by a hilarious madrigal, Contraponto Bestiale, made of animal sounds by Adriano Banchieri ( ) who was a monk! 6

7 Caneuon Gwerin y Tri Aderyn (Folk Songs of the Three Birds) was commissioned by the Friends of the National Youth Choir of Wales in memory of Robin Jones, a much loved broadcaster with S4C Wales and a great supporter of Welsh youth music. The arranger, Jeffrey Howard, is a concert pianist, composer and tireless vocal coach who also has a long association with the National Youth Choir of Wales. The three songs are simple and very beautiful. Eric Whitacre (b. January 1970) is an American choral composer who has leapt to global fame in recent years, especially as a result of his hugely successful CDs Cloudburst, Light and Gold and, this year, Water Night. He is also known for his Virtual Choir, using YouTube to create and synchronise performances of his work by individual singers from all over the world. Cantorum s repertoire already includes several of his pieces, with their distinctively rich sonorities, but Animal Crackers, Volumes 1 and 2, are pure musical fun. The ridiculous poems are very short by another American, Ogden Nash, that comic master of the unexpected rhyme and Whitacre s animal songs are equally short. And equally hilarious! He says: I ve always dreamed of writing a substantial collection of choral works that might enter the standard choral repertoire, something with the depth and passion of Monteverdi s Fourth Book of Madrigals and the charm and timelessness of Brahms s Liebeslieder Waltzes. I wrote this instead. Ogden Nash, by the way, was so well loved for his humorous verses that he actually had a US Postage stamp issued in his honour. You may well know him for: And Candy Is dandy But liquor Is quicker. To keep your marriage brimming With love in the loving cup, Whenever you re wrong, admit it, Whenever you re right, shut up! 7

8 Future Cantorum Concerts Date: Saturday 13th October 2012 Event: Autumn Concert Venue: All Saints Church, Marlow SL7 2AA Date: Event: Venue: Saturday 8th December 2012 (NB One performance only) Christmas Carol Concert Holy Trinity Church, Cookham SL6 9SP (NB Not Cookham Dean) Date: Sunday 17th February 2013 Event: Valentine s Supper Concert Venue: To Be Confirmed Grateful thanks are due to: The Stationery Depot, Cookham Rise Parade All others who have helped in the production of this concert And thanks to you, our audience, for your continued support If you would like to become a friend or a patron of Cantorum Choir, then please us: info@cantorumchoir.org.uk. If you or your organization would like to consider sponsoring Cantorum Choir in some way, then please call to discuss the various options. You can also follow us on Facebook Cantorum Choir info@cantorumchoir.org.uk This year supporting AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL & RENDEZVOUS AT ELIZABETH HOUSE 8 Registered Charity no: