Month: June 2015

Summer Anniversary Concert

The Southport Bach Choir’ s Anniversary Concert takes place in Holy Trinity Church Southport on Saturday 27 June at 7.30.

The music for this concert has been chosen to celebrate 50 years of music making. Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music sets words from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice which praise the power of music to arouse and reflect human emotions. The choir first sang it at its first concert (as Southport Bach Society) in 1965, and has sung it with each of its conductors: David Bowman (who founded the choir), David Williams, Ian Wells and now Ian Crawford.

The Serenade was composed in1938, but the choir is keen to keep up to date, and has shared in a new commission from a young composer who is rapidly making a name for himself: Will Todd. This, too, is a setting of words by Shakespeare, words particularly suited to a summer concert: ‘It was a lover and his lass’ (from As You Like It).

Another 21st-century piece in the concert is Bob Chilcott’s Aesop’s Fables (2008). Chilcott, one of the original King’s Singers, is skilled at writing choral music that is both approachable and contemporary in idiom. The final song of the set, ‘The Goose and the Swan’ is, appropriately enough, about singing.

Even more up to the minute is a piece that our Musical Director, Ian Crawford, has written especially for this concert – a joyful, dancing setting of Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Birthday’. A lovely birthday present for the choir.

The second half of the concert will be devoted to Vivaldi’s well known Gloria, when the choir will be accompanied by the strings of the Crosby Symphony Orchestra.

Tickets £10 available from tickets@southportbachchoir.org.uk.