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C antorum Choir is a dedicated and talented choir of approximately forty voices, based in Cookham, Berkshire. Under the directorship of Elisabeth Croft, the

ensemble continues to earn itself a reputation as one of the leading chamber choirs in the area. Cantorum boasts a wide-ranging repertoire and performs professional-quality concerts throughout the year. Two years ago, in the Choir of the Year 2014 competition, Cantorum was placed 5th nationally in the adult choir category. Two weeks ago, we entered the regional auditions in St Albans for Choir of the Year 2016. We are very proud to share the judge’s response: ‘That was absolutely sensational!’ The choir now goes through to the next level. We will keep you posted!

CANTORUM CHOIR

Patron Sponsor

Ralph Allwood MBE Aspen Worldwide

Soprano

Julia Bentley-Dawkes, Kate Cromar

Louise Evans, Kirsty Janusz

Jenny Knight, Julia Millard

Hilary Monaghan, Joy Strzelecki

Deborah Templing, Philippa Wallace

Tenor

Anthony Dowlatshahi, Philip Martineau,

Peter Roe, Malcolm Stork

John Timewell

Alto

Celia Armstrong, Bridget Bentley

Jill Burton, Jami Castell

Sarah Evans, Anne Glover

Anna Jacobs, Sandy Johnstone

Elspeth Scott, Chiu Sung

Lorna Sykes

Bass

Derek Beaven, John Buck

Arthur Creswell, Gordon Donkin

David Hazeldine, Ed Millard

Paul Seddon

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Elisabeth Croft (née Toye)—Music Director

Elisabeth is a graduate of Birmingham University and also of 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, the county training choir. She is also a regular tutor for the National Youth Choirs of Wales.

Adrienne Black—Piano

Adrienne studied at the Royal College of Music, where she won the inter-collegiate Raymond Russell and Geoffrey Tankard harpsichord prizes. She has performed as a piano/harpsichord soloist, accompanist/continuo player and chamber musician throughout the UK and in Europe, in venues ranging from palaces and prisons (with Sir Yehudi Menuhin’s ‘Live Music Now) to the South Bank. She teaches piano and accompanies for Bradfield College, is the Artistic Director for ‘Concerts in Caversham’—a successful and fully professional Chamber Concert series—and is also much in demand playing for dance in the South of England.

Re-enter ARIEL, invisible, playing and singing

Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Burthen: Ding-dong

Hark! now I hear them: Ding-dong, bell.

Samples from the original texts for Three Shakespeare Songs by Vaughan Williams

PROSPERO

You do look, my son, in a mov’d sort, As if you were dismay’d: be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

Enter from opposite sides, A FAIRY and PUCK

PUCK

How now, spirit! Whither wander you?

FAIRY

Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander every where, Swifter than the moone's sphere; And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green: The cowslips tall her pensioners be; In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours; I must go seek some dewdrops here And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear. Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I'll be gone: Our queen and all our elves come here anon.

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If Music be the Food of Love...

Birthday Madrigals John Rutter

It was a Lover and his Lass (from As You Like It)

Draw on Sweet Night (John Wilbye 1574—1638)

Come live with me (Christopher Marlowe/?Ralegh/?Shakespeare)

My True Love hath my Heart (Sir Philip Sidney 1554—1586 Astrophel & Stella)

When Daisies pied (from Love’s Labour’s Lost)

Three Shakespeare Songs Ralph Vaughan Williams

Full Fathom Five (from The Tempest)

The Cloud-capped Towers (from The Tempest)

Over Hill, over Dale (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

From ‘Let us Garlands Bring’ Gerald Finzi

Come away, come away, Death (from Twelfth Night) Baritone Derek Beaven

Who is Silvia? (from Two Gentlemen of Verona)

& O Mistress Mine (from Twelfth Night) Baritone Ed Millard

Songs of Springtime E J Moeran

Under the Greenwood Tree (Shakespeare)

The River-God’s Song (John Fletcher 1579—1625)

Spring, the Sweet Spring (Thomas Nashe 1567—1601)

Love is a Sickness (Samuel Daniel 1562—1619)

Sigh no more, Ladies (Shakespeare)

Good Wine (William Browne 1591—1643)

To Daffodils (Robert Herrick 1591—1674)

Interval

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Her Sacred Spirit Soars Eric Whitacre

The choir is split into two units. The text is an acrostic sonnet specially written by Charles Anthony Silvestri

Song for Athene John Tavener

The text is adapted by Mother Thekla of Whitby from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Orthodox Church Funeral Service

Songs and Sonnets George Shearing

Live with me and be my Love (Christopher Marlowe/?Ralegh/?Shakespeare)

When Daffodils begin to peer (from The Winter’s Tale)

Who is Silvia? (from Two Gentlemen of Verona)

Fie on sinful Fantasy (from The Merry Wives of Windsor)

Hey, ho, the Wind and the Rain (from Twelfth Night)

West Side Story Medley Bernstein/Sondheim Arr. Len Thomas

Tonight

I feel pretty

Maria Baritone Paul Seddon, Alto Sarah Evans, Soprano Kirsty Janusz

America

One Hand, one Heart Tenor Malcolm Stork, Soprano Kirsty Janusz

Somewhere

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W illiam Shakespeare died four hundred years ago this year at the age of fifty-two. Musicians ever since have felt moved to respond to the extraordinary

imaginative power of his poetry.

The composers featured in tonight’s programme were all born in the twentieth century. It would be true to say, however, that in order to achieve these settings, each has lent a very attentive ear to the music of Shakespeare’s own era. Sir John Tavener (1944—2013) was even directly descended from the early Tudor composer John Taverner, and in his Song for Athene (now widely known following its use at the funeral of Princess Diana) we clearly hear the influence of Early English sacred music alongside the sound-world of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Elizabethan echoes are equally prominent in Her Sacred Spirit Soars by the much admired American choral composer Eric Whitacre. Here, in a commission for the Heartland Shakespeare Festival at the University of Wisconsin, Whitacre conjures up the glorious cathedral sound of Tallis and Byrd, while the text (a sonnet by his friend Tony Silvestri) both encapsulates and celebrates Thomas Morley’s famous tribute book of madrigals for Elizabeth I (published in 1601 as The Triumphs of Oriana).

Madrigals are, of course, the secular and more intimate wing of the Elizabethan style, and it is with John Rutter’s jazz madrigals that we open our concert tonight. The collection was written for the seventy-fifth birthday of the great jazz pianist George Shearing—whose own madrigals we perform in the programme’s second half. Both sets are firm favourites with choirs and audiences all over the world.

Less well-known are E J Moeran’s Songs of Springtime. These appear deceptively simple at first glance, but their surface hides a fascinating chromaticism and rhythmic complexity, which creates real freshness in performance. We are very pleased to add Moeran’s work to our repertoire; we believe he should be more widely performed.

The Fool in Twelfth Night sings two of the Finzi songs. ‘Come away, come away, Death’ attempts to ‘comfort’ poor lovelorn Count Orsino, while ’O Mistress Mine’ is offered to amuse the drunken knights Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek. ‘Who is Silvia?’, from Two Gentlemen of Verona, is a delightfully lively take on the little lyric that Schubert first set for piano and voice. Finzi brings out all the joy in the poem, and uses its final line ‘To her, let us garlands bring’ as the overall title of his cycle. (We should note here, that yet another celebration of the beautiful Silvia occurs after the interval!)

Of all the evening’s composers, though, it is perhaps Vaughan Williams who most poignantly captures Shakespeare’s spirit landscape: that ‘other world’ he seems to perceive beyond ordinary beauty and everyday life. In this sense, it could be said that the poet already had one foot in music’s territory, requiring composers simply to remain open to the verse. In the Three Shakespeare Songs, Vaughan Williams achieves this quite breathtakingly. The first re-imagines the sprite Ariel’s watery bell song of transformation ‘Full Fathom Five thy Father lies…’ from The Tempest. Then follows the great speech on theatrical illusion and life’s insubstantiality by Prospero, his master: ’The cloud-capped Towers…’. The third song takes lines spoken by a fairy to the mischievous spirit, Puck (who stands in the same servant/master relation to Oberon), from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her words become musical magic.

Returning to the second half of the evening, we have a firm favourite in George Shearing’s Songs and Sonnets. Shearing was born in Battersea in 1919. Blind from birth, he became a phenomenally accomplished jazz pianist, achieving world-wide fame after his emigration in 1947 to America, where he performed and recorded for the rest of his life. Despite taking US citizenship, Shearing maintained affectionate links with Britain, returning often and eventually finding himself knighted by the Queen in 2007. Tonight’s pieces are a product of his later-life interest in choral sound and a more ‘classical’ direction. Their first performance was in 1999 with the composer at the piano and John Rutter as guest conductor.

Our final item tonight is, of course, the wonderful medley of songs from Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story. As everyone knows, the story is of Romeo and Juliet, brought into a mid-twentieth century jazz setting of gang conflict in New York’s West Side district. What could be a better finish?!

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SPONSORSHIP

C antorum Choir has been delighted to gain a sponsorship arrangement with

Aspen Worldwide

This sponsorship will enable the choir to take on yet more demanding pieces of work

and also to move forward in a variety of other ways.

CHARITIES

C antorum was extremely pleased to have been able to donate a total of £1,000 to

our two chosen charities as a result of this year’s Christmas Concert.

Our two supported charities this year:

T he Sepsis Trust was proposed by Pippa Wallace in memory of her mother, Marianne Stork,

who was a founder member of Cantorum Choir. ‘The illness known as the silent killer affects

150,000 people every year in Britain and kills 44,000—considerably more than breast and bowel

cancer combined. In fact, Sepsis kills approximately 30% of those taken into hospital for

intensive care. But, despite the fatal consequences, it often goes undetected until it is far too late

for treatment to be effective.’

sepsistrust.org

www.justgiving.com/uksepsistrust

T he Navakiran Orphanage, Nepal was proposed by

Bridget Bentley, whose friends in Marlow Rotary Club

are collecting on behalf of the children. Contributions from

Cantorum’s Christmas Concert collection were sent early

and are already making a difference to the children’s

welfare.

navakiranorphanage.org

Help Cantorum Choir just by shopping online.

Give as you Live is an award-winning fundraising platform for charities. Shop with your favourite stores, and a donation from the retailer will be made to Cantorum Choir without costing you a penny extra. Compare prices and shop at thousands of leading stores like Amazon, Expedia and John Lewis.

www.giveasyoulive.com/charity/cantorumchoir

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Grateful thanks are due to:

Jozef Janik, Robert Jones, Chris Cromar (pianists)

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 be on our mailing list, please email us:

info@cantorumchoir.org.uk

If you or your organisation would like to consider sponsoring

Cantorum Choir in some way, then please call us

on 07711 056661 to discuss the various options

You can also follow us

on Facebook: www.facebook.com/cantorumchoir

on Twitter: @CantorumChoir

Cantorum Choir—Registered Charity no. 1136210

Future Cantorum Concerts:

Date: Saturday 8th October 2016

Event: Autumn Concert with Orchestra

Venue: All Saints Church, Marlow SL7 2AA

Date: Saturday 10th December 2016

Event: Christmas Concert

Venue: Holy Trinity Church, Cookham SL6 9SP

Date: Saturday 11th February 2017

Event: Valentines Dinner Concert

Venue: The Odney Club, Cookham SL6 9SR

www.cantorumchoir.org.uk

info@cantorumchoir.org.uk

This year supporting

THE SEPSIS TRUST

&

THE NAVAKIRAN ORPHANAGE, NEPAL