Welcome Registered Charity No 1055674
Welcome to Cantores - a much sought-after chamber choir with a growing reputation for innovative and exciting programming, and for memorable performances in and around the Cotswolds.
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ENGLAND’S 20TH CENTURY MUSICAL RENAISSANCE
We spread our cloths under your feet – ‘but tread softly because you tread on our dreams…’
For our forthcoming 2012 Spring concert season, Cantores are thrilled to be performing some of the most inspiring works from England’s magnificent 20th century musical renaissance, what’s more doing so in the splendour of two of the country’s most beautiful Parish Churches – the Church of the Holy Innocents in Highnam, just outside Gloucester, and John the Baptist in Cirencester.
For centuries, English composers would take foreign names in the hope of making an impact in Europe, where their country was known, as the Germans put it in the century before last, as “Das Land ohne Musik” – the Land Without Music.
The truth is, of course, that our islands have been awash with music all the time, and no more so than during the past 100 years, when our world of choral music founded on traditions going back to the time of the first Elizabeth prospered as never before. Continue reading The Cloths of Heaven, Highnam March 3, & Cirencester March 10, 2012
 Cantores concluded our 20th anniversary year with one of the most inspiring and well-attended concerts we’ve ever performed, with six exquisite and beautiful new English songs by our Musical Director John Holloway, set to poems (click here for the texts) by the early 20th century poet John Drinkwater.
The songs were the highlight of a programme opening with Vaughan Williams’ famous ‘Serenade to Music’, and concluding with Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s exquisite 17th century popular-melody-based ‘Midnight Mass for Christmas Eve’.
As an additional a capella item, we also performed the beautiful Faire is the Heaven by William Harris.
We’re grateful to stalwart Cotswolds reviewer Donald Hollins for the following thoughts about the concert, after which please enjoy John’s own pre-concert musings on how he came to write these songs – and also the picture on the right of our Cantores-sponsored Christmas tree in the Parish Church, complete with celebratory balloons. Continue reading Celebration – new Cotswold songs by John Holloway, marking 20 years of Cantores
 Cantores celebrates its 20th anniversary this year and (after a wonderful choir dinner at Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural College with several former members and musical directors past), we began our musical reminiscence on July 2 with a magnificent concert of songs both sacred and secular in Cirencester Parish Church.
The acoustics of the church, with its new flat floor and spectacularly restored Father Willis organ, spoke beautifully to the choir’s strengths, and it was perhaps one of the best performances we’ve given in our two decades since Cantores’ first 1991 concert in Tetbury.
There was contemporary humour and mystical contemplation, and a particularly vivacious (and in the event reassuringly coordinated) performance of Bob Chilcott’s ‘The Making of the Drum’, a work inspired by African sounds and rhythms and highlighting a number of percussion instruments from drum to sticks and sandblocks.
We performed largely the same programme to an enthusiastic audience on Friday July 22 at Holy Trinity Church in the beautiful Dorset coastal villag of West Lulworth, as highlight of their last Coast and Country Festival.
Our present musical director John Holloway summarised the thinking behind our 2011 summer’s programme: Continue reading Gems – Celebrating 20 Years of Cantores
Our performances of Handel’s Dixit Dominus at St Mary’s Parish Church in Tetbury on Saturday Feb 26 and on March 12 at Northleach’s Church of St Peter and St Paul were a triumph. We’re grateful to Donald Hollins for the following review of the Tetbury concert, and see towards the end of this post for the full programme notes.
TETBURY’S lovely and elegant church, with its ranks of box pews, provided a gracious setting for this talented choir’s concert.
It opened with Monteverdi’s Beatus Vir with its arresting and oft repeated chorus from the sopranos. A setting of Psalm 112 this motet has a haunting quality. Like all this composer’s work it is dramatic and imaginative in the way it employs voices and instruments with striking harmonies and is altogether a compelling work. The Fantasia in F minor for a Mechanical Organ was written by Mozart in his last year and that organ must have been primitive compared with the fine instrument at Tetbury on which John Wright gave an impressive performance. It was fascinating to listen to the complex fugue.
Continue reading Dixit Dominus
 For our two end-of-year concerts in 2010, in Cheltentham’s All Saints Church on November 13 and in Cirencester’s magnificent Parish Church with its new organ on December 4, we chose three examples.
Since the dawn of the Christian era, composers have set the Ordinary of the Mass, those five sections of the liturgy which are unchanging at each celebration, with music of the very greatest inspiration. We have chosen three examples from different traditions, each designed for liturgical performance, but highly contrasted and reflecting the artistic preoccupations of their time and place.
Continue reading Missa
 Cantores performed two concerts of delightful and varied English Pastoral music and words on Friday 2nd July 2010 at St Peter’s Church, Rendcomb College, following a well-received first outing of this fabulous music at St John the Baptist Burford on Saturday 19th June. As one concert-comer wrote afterwards:
“A superb concert. I loved the mixture of poems & music. I found the music a most interesting concoction with several most amusing themes. I enjoyed your wide selections of well expressed poems. I bet that there was a lot of hard work in putting the concert together, but also must have been great fun. The quality of the work is fantastic.”
Our conductor John Holloway writes:
Continue reading English Pastoral
 Cantores at Tetbury, March 6 2010 Following a very well-received performance in Tetbury’s Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin on March 6, Cantores presented French, German and Italian masterpieces from the golden age of the Baroque, with John Holloway conducting and organist John Wright, at Northleach Parish Church on Saturday March 13.
See below for two reviews of the evening.
The programme included:
JS Bach – Lobet den Herrn
Pergolesi – Magnificat
Vivaldi – Domine ad adiuvandum
Delalande – Super Flumina Babilonis
Handel organ concerto Op 6
Caldara -Crucifixus
Reviews
We’re grateful to Doug Watt for the following review:
This was an enterprising evening of baroque choral motets by this artful choir, leavened by a Handel Organ concerto and Couperin string suite, ‘L’Espagnol’.
Continue reading European Baroque Masters
Friday December 4th, 2009 at Cirencester Parish Church, in aid of the Campaign for Cirencester Parish Church. The profits went towards the repair of the South Porch, also known as the Town Hall.
The programme:
Schubert: Gebet and Gott im Ungewitter
SS Wesley: Ascribe unto the Lord and Blessed be the God and Father
Brahms: Warum ist das Licht gegeben
Mendelssohn: Hear my prayer and Richte mich Gott
Stanford: Three motets
Continue reading Romantic Spirit
Saturday 20th June 2009 concert at St Lawrence Church, Lechlade
Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia, Seiber Nonsense songs, John Rutter Birthday Madrigals, Negro Spirituals from Tippett’s Child of Our Time
July 17th 2009
Cantores performed this same programme at the Lulworth Festival in Dorset.
Continue reading Fantasy: Lechlade and Lulworth, June/July 2009
“London” at Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin, Church St, Tetbury Saturday 7th March 2009
and also Church of St Peter and St Paul, Northleach Saturday 14th March 2009
Purcell – My heart is inditing, Jehova quam multi sunt, Hear my prayer, I was glad
Handel – My heart is inditing, The king shall rejoice
Greene - Lord let me know mine end
Boyce - Where shall wisdom be found?
Purcell – Chacony
Handel - Organ Concerto
The string players were: Robert Bishop, Justine Tomlinson, Cecily Howick, Rachel Howgego, Dave Ayre and our local celebrated organist John Wright.
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