Celebrating Christmas with music and festive nibbles
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Clocks have gone back, nights are drawing in and Christmas is coming. Our Christmas concert is a real celebration of glorious festive music this year telling the Christmas story with A Ceremony of Carols by Britten and O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen and ending with Love Divine by Howard Goodall.
The concert is at St Peter’s on Saturday 10th December at a new time of 3pm so you can pop along after some Christmas shopping and join us for mulled wine and festive nibbles after the concert. There will be both traditional and modern carols so little ones will recognise some and are more than welcome.
Sunday 19 June 2-5pm, Homewood Road URC, St Albans, AL1 4BH
The St Cecilia Festival Society combines four choirs from the St Albans area – St Albans Chamber Choir, Aeolian Singers, Hardynge Choir and Radlett Choir – with St Albans Symphony Orchestra
We come together every two years to perform a major choral work in St Albans Abbey.
On October 15th we will perform Haydn’s Creation
Come and sing this amazing piece with us in a free workshop, led by our conductor, John Gibbons. Music and refreshments provided.
Taking its title from a set of brilliant improvisations by Antony Saunders of George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm for choir and piano, this concert showcases jazz-enriched choral music.
John Rutter celebrates another jazz great – George Shearing – in his choral suite Birthday Madrigals, written for his friend’s 75th birthday. Five poems from the era of the Elizabethan madrigal and two by Shakespeare are set to jazz rhythms combined with the styles of the English madrigal and part-song.
In the Beginning by Aaron Copland takes text from the Book of Genesis (King James Version) to describe the six days of creation followed by a day of rest. It is scored for choir and mezzo-soprano soloist.
Mystic composer Morten Lauridsen uses poems in French, Spanish and English by the twentieth century poets Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda and James Agee with the common theme of night in his song cycle Nocturnes for choir and piano.
In Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine, composer Eric Whitacre and poet Charles Anthony Silvestri create a soundtrack to Leonardo da Vinci’s imagination as he dreams about the possibility of flight.
Heitor Villa-Lobos believed that if Johann Sebastian Bach had been born in twentieth century Brazil, he would have composed music like the Bachianas Brasileiras suite, fusing his own style with Brazilian folk and popular music. No 9 is written for an ‘orchestra of voices’.
Please join us after the concert for summer refreshments in the garden
On Saturday 5 March 2022 at 7:30 pm we gave a concert in the Lady Chapel, St Albans Cathedral, of a cappella choral music for Lent entitled All Shall Be Well. Before we started the planned programme, we sang a A Prayer for Ukraine as a tribute. The leaving collection raised £872.88 which has gone to the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for Ukraine.
A collection of a cappella choral music for Lent on the themes of grief and suffering and the promise of Paradise in the afterlife.
The legendary Miserere by Gregorio Allegri, with its mixture of plainsong and glorious ornamentation, has a complex history. Originally composed in 1638 for the Sistine Chapel Choir, the story goes that transcribing it or performing it elsewhere was prohibited by the Pope on pain of excommunication. The fourteen-year-old Mozart on a visit to Rome in 1770 is alleged to have transcribed it from memory and allowed it to be published. In 1831, Felix Mendelssohn heard it sung a fourth higher and so produced the section including the famous top Cs. Consequently, the version sung nowadays has been described as a patchwork derived from many different sources.
As senior choirmaster at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice in the early eighteenth century, Antonio Lotti composed much high-quality sacred music. His eight-part setting of the Crucifixus from the Credo of the Mass depicts the pain and exhaustion of crucifixion using musical devices such as suspensions, chromaticism, discords and modulation.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was one of the most prolific and highly acclaimed musicians of the sixteenth century. His work is seen as setting the standard for Renaissance polyphony. The intricate Stabat Mater dolorosa for double choir, written for the Sistine Chapel Choir around 1590, has many changes of rhythm and mood to describe Mary’s suffering at the foot of the Cross.
Palestrina’s influence, along with that of Wagner, can be heard in the motet Christus Factus Est composed by the devoutly religious Austrian composer Anton Bruckner. First performed in 1884, it depicts Christ’s journey of ‘obedience unto death’.
The wingbeats of angels bearing us to Paradise are represented by a solo viola and cello In Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’ piece In Paradisum (2012). The words from the Requiem Mass antiphon sung as the body is taken from the church for burial are voiced by the choir.
Similar words from Shakespeare’s Hamlet are used in John Tavener’s piece Song for Athene, sung at Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997, together with text from the funeral service of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
In All Shall Be Well (2009), for double choir and solo cello, Roxanna Panufnik sets 14th century texts from the plainsong hymn Bogurodzica sung by Polish knights as they went into battle and from the Revelations of Divine Love by the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. The knights’ pleas that they go to Paradise are answered by Julian’s comforting words: “at the last day, you shall see it all transformed into great joy”.
