November 2011 Newsletter

Welcome!

To our first new-style Cantores newsletter, with CORRECTED MARCH DATES 2012…

• Details of our next concert in Cirencester, Saturday Dec 3, including six wonderful new Cotswolds songs by our Director John Holloway…
• A glimpse into how we hope – perhaps with your help – to boost our audiences and spread the word just how good a choir we are…
• A link to a couple of recordings you can now listen to of our Spring concert of music by Handel, and…
• Some words about what are, this year, 20 years of musicmaking by Cantores in the Cotswolds, and looking ahead to forthcoming concert dates. (With new and correct dates for our first 2012 concerts).

Cirencester @ Christmas

For our Winter concert in 2011, at 7.30 on Saturday December 3, 2011 in Cirencester Parish Church, with the Christmas Market in full swing outside, Cantores are particularly proud in our 20th anniversary year to be singing a suite of beautiful new English songs set to poems (click here for the texts) by the early 20th century Gloucestershire poet John Drinkwater.

The songs have been especially composed for us and for this occasion by our Musical Director John Holloway, and are the highlight of a programme opening with Vaughan Williams’ famous Serenade to Music, and concluding by way of Faire is the Heaven by William Harris with Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s exquisite 17th century popular-melody-based Midnight Mass for Christmas Eve.

For tickets and more information both about Drinkwater and about John's thoughts in composing these wonderful new songs, do visit www.cantores.net.

Cantores Profile

We're working on how we want Cantores to look, but we do now have active Twitter (click the link and do follow us – we're @CantoresCW) and Facebook pages, if that's your thing. And if it isn't yet, do have a browse, as it can be quite fun. To get things going, we've got some early tweets, and have posted pictures of recent concerts and our Cantores gala dinner this last summer at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester.

The Big C on the left is our present, new, simple logo. With help from tenor David Hudson and his graphic-designer wife Rachel, we're developing what one might call a new corporate identity, with lovely pastel colours and an ironic twist as reflected so far in the invitation above to the December concert.

Bear with us as the designs are tested in the coming months – with the hope of raising our musical profile across the Cotswolds and building audiences and, we hope, an enthusiastic following. 

Please do forward this newsletter (using the button at the bottom of this page) to anyone you think might be interested. If you haven't already done so, please also sign up on the website both to updates there and/or (you've got the option to do either or both) to future (don't worry – infrequent) editions of this newsletter.

Cantores on YouTube

Cantores' performance of Handel's Dixit Dominus in Northleach and Cirencester before Easter was felt by many in the choir, and many in our audiences, to have been one of the choir's best musical moments in 20 years of singing in churches around the Cotwolds. .

We're grateful to Dave Webb, partner of long-serving Cantores alto Mandy Sturman, for recording the Northleach concert, and as an experiment, we've posted the opening movement Dixit Dominus, and the wonderful closing Gloria, on YouTube.

No moving images, but a first internet taster of how we can sound. Do take a listen, and be inspired, we hope, to put our three sets of yearly concerts firmly into your diary.

Looking Ahead – with new March 2012 dates

It's not all just earnest singing and rehearsing at Cantores. Once a year, when we perform in Tetbury Parish Church, we get to have fun with the ritual assembly of their very special staging. Here being effected by our Keeper-of-the-Scores David Bryant (l.) and founder member of Cantores and our very top tenor Martin Graham (r.)

In this 20th anniversary year of Cantores, we were joined in July at a black tie dinner at Cirencester's Royal Agricultural College by singers new and old(er), with a quiz on the choir's history and tables named after our favourite composers – here Purcell, and also Byrd, Finzi, Vaughan Williams, Rutter and Parry. 

And also in July, at concerts in Cirencester Parish Church and at the Lulworth Coast and Country Festival in Dorset, we performed a magnificent and extraordinarily varied set of songs and music that have our favourite Gems over the past 20 years. In due course, we hope to post a couple of those recordings on our website too. 

In the meantime, looking ahead, here are some firm performance dates for your diary.

British 20th Century Music Renaissance

Note Corrected Dates: On Saturday March 3rd, in Highnam Parish Church, and repeated in Cirencester on Saturday March 10th, we shall explore the British Renaissance of music in the 20th century.

That’s home ground for Cantores, who delight in the music of Stanford, Holst, John Tavener and the new young Turks of the choral world James Macmillan, Jonathan Dove and Howard Skempton.

Dance and Sing

For our Summer concerts next year (2012), entitled Dance and Sing, we will be joined by cornetts and sackbuts to perform music of Renaissance Europe with a particular slant towards folk inspired compositions.

These will be in Northleach on Saturday June 16th and Tetbury on Saturday June 30th, 2012.

Beyond those dates, do make a note of the following for your diary – and more details in due course in future editions of this newsletter.

Sat 1 Dec 2012 – Cirencester Parish Church

Sat 23 Feb 2013 – Cirencester

Sat 2 Mar 2013 – Highnam

Sat 18 May 2013 – Northleach

Sat 8 June 2013 - Tetbury

And finally….

We hope you've enjoyed this first emailed newsletter. There's much more one could say about the enjoyment that singing in Cantores gives to both us as singers and, we hope, to our supporters and audiences. 

If you've any thoughts or ideas, do let us know, and above all, do spread the word about Cantores, and feel free to forward this newsletter to friends and colleages.

We look forward to harmonious future encounters at forthcoming concerts.