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.
We're now on both Facebook and Twitter. Also, you can order tickets here (nice discount if you book online), sign up to our newsletter and catch up on concerts forthcoming and past.
You can use the Contact Us form to reach us by telephone or email. We look forward to welcoming you to our concerts.
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January 2012 Newsletter
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Welcome to our second new-style Cantores newsletter, with details of two exciting Cotswolds concerts coming up in March, and more…
- Do join us for The Cloths of Heaven, on Saturday March 3 in Highnam’s glorious Church of the Holy Innocents (just outside Gloucester), or a week later on March 10 (both 7.30pm) in our familiar Parish Church of St John the Baptist, Cirencester.
- Enjoy some more information and pictures of the amazing Highnam Church – built and decorated extravagently by the father of Sir Hubert Parry, one of the great figures of English romantic music.
- An introduction to how you can save money by booking Cantores concerts tickets online.
- Listen to new recordings of our December premiere performance of Cantores Musical Director John Holloway’s new songs about the Cotswolds
- An opportunity to browse to all the choir’s past newsletters over 20 years, and…
- Also an invitation to sponsor Cantores tenor Mark Brayne on a four-month cycle trip from Cirencester to Hanoi, beginning in April and raising money, among other good causes, for the choir.
- And, if you’ve been forwarded this newsletter by a friend, please do consider signing up for the newsletter mailing list yourself, via the Cantores website, to ensure you never miss an issue.
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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 St 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.
Our March programme, much of it reflecting a sacred cathedral tradition that is the musical envy of the world, begins, of course, with Benjamin Britten, and then arcs back to Charles Villiers Stanford, an Irishman steeped in the 19th century European traditions who transformed English cathedral music with his anthems and settings of the canticles.
Via Vaughan Williams, Holst and Walton, we travel the century to composers of our own time, John Tavener, James Macmillan, Jonathan Dove and Howard Skempton.
All these composers have given our choirs works of outstanding brilliance and sensitivity to the texts, not just the King James Bible but John Bunyan, Edward Spenser. W.B.Yeats and Greek liturgies.
To book tickets online (at the discounted price of £8 plus booking fee – £10 on the door on the night), please click here to be taken to our concert booking website.
Alternatively, tickets are available from either Gloucester or Cirencester Tourist Information offices, or at the Cornerstone Bookshop on Dollar Street in Cirencester.
For full details of the programme for these two stunning and uplifting evenings of the best choral music England has produced over a century, do visit our main website cantores.net.
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JOHN HOLLOWAY’S COTSWOLDS SONGS RECORDED
We were thrilled just how many of you came to our most recent concert at Cirencester Parish Church on Saturday December 3, where we performed six exquisite new songs about the Cotswolds by Dymock poet John Drinkwater, especially set to music by our Musical Director John Holloway to mark Cantores’ 20th anniversary year.
For those who were there, and for those who missed this wonderful, tender concert, there’s now the opportunity to hear our recordings of those six songs, posted on YouTube.
Click here to enjoy, and we would be delighted to hear what you think. Being a social network, there’s room to post comments…
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CIRENCESTER TO HANOI
Here’s a chance both to do some satisfying vicarious globe-trotting, and sponsor Cantores tenor and webmaster Mark Brayne on a madcap four-month cycle ride from Cirencester to Hanoi.Mark’s leaving at Easter, heading first to Moscow via St Petersburg – about 3000 miles – and then, after a quick Transsiberian cheat on the train, from Beijing to Hanoi, a further couple of thousand miles.
Mark is a Cirencester-based psychotherapist and former BBC foreign correspondent, taking his bike to revisit lands he used to report from. He’ll be blogging at www.psychlotherapist.com (terrible pun…) where there are buttons where you can sponsor him per mile or per broken spoke or per country.
He’s raising money for Cantores, and for two other good therapeutic and journalistic causes – the Humanitarian Assistance Programme of the EMDR therapy in which Mark specialises, and the Rory Peck Trust which supports freelance and local journalists and their families in zones of conflict and war.
Hoping his knees and much else hold out at 62, Mark is no stranger to long-distance biking, having completed a 4000-mile round trip to Budapest in 2008. The picture above captures the moment of his wearied return home.
Also, if you’re a reasonably competent tenor, or know one, Mark’s total 6-month absence opens a space for singing with Cantores through the summer into the autumn. Let us know via the website if you’d like more details.
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HIGHNAM’S HOLY INNOCENTS
If Cirencester Parish Church needs no introduction – we sing most of our concerts there – Highnam’s church of the Holy Innocents, just West of Gloucester, is a rarer venue for us, last visited in 2007 and an extraordinary gem of High Victorian Gothic architecture that’s more than worth a journey even without the music.
The church was financed and built in the late 19th Century - and personally and most lavishly decorated – by Thomas Gambier Parry, father of Hubert Parry who as his father’s only longer-surviving child went on to become one of the greatest composers of English Romantic music, and founder of London’s Royal College of Music.
 Parry chose the name Holy Innocents in memory of the four Parry children who died in childhood, and of his first wife, their mother Isabella who also died young of TB. Such was the life and fate of an ordinary if wealthy Gloucestershire family barely 100 years ago.
 Looking up at the magnificent gilded angels and their trumpets on either side of the Christ figure above the nave, it’s hard to conceive that so much money, time and faith would be invested in a small parish church, with a congregation of just a few hundred local farm workers.
But if theirs was the investment, ours as 21st century concert goers and performers is the appreciation.
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CANTORES TICKETS AT A DISCOUNT
The Eventbrite logo above isn’t just a plug for a commercial ticket agency – it’s the way we’re keen to encourage supporters of the music we sing to register early for concerts, and to commit to coming.
And, to help the system bed down, we’re offering a generous discount for our next two concerts for tickets booked online – £8 a ticket (plus booking fee) instead of £10 either on the door or through the usual outlets.
Eventbrite are a US-based company who do, of course, charge a small commission on the tickets they sell, but with whom we’ve negotiated a discount as a British charity.
We find – as we hope you do – their booking system very easy to use, with tickets you can print out yourself, nice lists for us to track who’s booked and then check them in to the actual concerts.
You can, as always, buy tickets for our concerts at the Cornerstone Bookshop on Dollar Street in Cirencester, or order them through the post from our  indefatigable, ever-cheerful and long-standing choir alto Lynne Whitworth, on 01453 840878.
Tickets are also available from Cirencester and Gloucester Tourist Information Offices, in the Corinium Museum and on Southgate Street respectively.
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NEWSLETTERS PAST AND PRESENT
Cantores have been singing around the Cotswolds, developing and deepening our repetoire, for more than 20 years now.In tribute to those years, and to all the singers and Directors who have worked with the choir over that time, we’ve collated and posted on our Cantores website all the newsletters produced since 1991.Who knows, maybe there’s an MA, or a PhD, or just an enthusiastic offspring’s school project just waiting to chart the choir’s journey through the end of one millennium into the beginning of the next. Do take a look. You might find something to inspire…
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