CANTORUM CHOIR & ORCHESTRA

Inspiring Voices — Giving Pleasure Cookham’s Chamber Choir

All Creatures

Great &

Small !

Saturday 23rd June

7:30 pm

Holy Trinity Church

Cookham

MUSICAL DIRECTOR — ELISABETH TOYE

£1.50

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CANTORUM CHOIR

C antorum Choir is a lively, committed choir of approximately forty

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

Altos

Bridget Bentley, Jill Burton

Jami Castell, Sarah Evans Anne Glover, Joanna Henwood

Chiu Sung, Lorna Sykes

Anna Trocmé Latter

Tenors

William Branston, David Hazeldine Philip Martineau, Malcolm Stork

John Timewell

Basses

Derek Beaven, John Buck

Arthur Creswell, Gordon Donkin Charles Luxford, Paul Seddon

Inspiring Voices — Giving Pleasure

Cookham’s Chamber Choir

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Elisabeth Toye (Musical Director)

Elisabeth is a graduate of Birmingham University and the Royal Academy of Music, where she won the 2004 Mi-chael 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 Berk-shire Maestros (The Young Musicians’ Trust) and is cur-rently 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 giv-

en concerts in many countries, and is a recipient of several prizes, including First prize in the International Piano Competition in Hra-

dec Kralove, Czech Republic. In this country he has performed pi-ano 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 stories-with-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 be-

tween 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)

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Aesop’s Fables Bob Chilcott

The Lamb John Tavener

&

The Tyger

Piano Music: The Flying Circus Jozef Janik Piano

The Silver Swan Orlando Gibbons

The Blue Bird Charles Stanford

Little Horses Aaron Copland

Contraponto Bestiale Adriano Banchieri

(Animal Counterpoint)

INTERVAL

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

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Caneuon Gwerin y Tri Aderyn Arr. Jeffrey Howard

(Folk songs of the three birds)

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

Animal Crackers Volume 2 Eric Whitacre

Piano accompanist — Jozef Janik

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)

i. The Panther

ii. The Cow

iii. The Firefly

i. The Canary

ii. The Eel

iii. The Kangaroo

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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, inno-

cence 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 sev-eral 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 Sher-

rard, a British philoso-pher 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 (1583-1625), 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 fa-mous piece inspired by a bird. The Blue Bird was published in 1910 by Charles Vil-

liers Stanford (1852-1924), one of the great names of British music from the Victori-an 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 (1900-1990). 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 (1567-1634) who was a monk!

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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 mu-

sic. 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 syn-

chronise performances of his work by individual

singers from all over the world. Cantorum’s reper-toire 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 mas-

ter of the unexpected rhyme — and Whitacre’s animal songs are equally short. And equally hilari-

ous! 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 actual-ly had a US Postage stamp issued in his honour.

You may well know him for:

Candy Is dandy

But liquor Is quicker.

And

To keep your marriage brimming

With love in the loving cup,

Whenever you’re wrong, admit it, Whenever you’re right, shut up!

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Future Cantorum Concerts

Date: Saturday 13th October 2012

Event: Autumn Concert

Venue: All Saints’ Church, Marlow SL7 2AA

Date: Saturday 8th December 2012 (NB One performance only)

Event: Christmas Carol Concert

Venue: 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 email us:

info@cantorumchoir.org.uk. If you or your organization would like to consider sponsoring

Cantorum Choir in some way, then please call 01628 475158 to discuss the various

options. You can also follow us on Facebook www.facebook.com/cantorumchoir.

www.cantorumchoir.org.uk Cantorum Choir info@cantorumchoir.org.uk

This year supporting

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL & RENDEZVOUS AT ELIZABETH HOUSE

Registered Charity no: 1136210