Tours
2010 Tours
Dublin and Manchester
The mixed choir will be singing in St. Patrick's Cathedral Dublin from Sunday 18th to Wednesday 21st and in Manchester Cathedral from Sunday 29th to Tuesday 31st August.
BBC Services
The mixed choir will be singing the Daily Service on Radio 4 LW on Monday 30th, Tuesday 31st of August and September 1st and 2nd at 9.45 a.m.
Christmas Concert at Buxton Opera House 2010
On Sunday 11 December at 7.30 p.m. the mixed choir joined the Buxton Choral and Orchestral Society as special guests in Buxton Opera House for a Christmas Concert.
Tickets £13.50 and £11.50 available from Buxton Opera House Box Office on 0845 127 2190 or www.buxtonoperahouse.org.uk
Recent tours have included Venice in 2001, where the choir sang in venues including St Mark's; Norway in December 2004, where the choir sang concerts and services in a number of churches, schools and public places in Trondheim, as well as in Trondheim's famous Cathedral; and Sicily in December 2005, where the choir took part in Palermo University's Festival, singing concerts in the Cathedral and University, individually and alongside other choirs from various European Universities.
Most recently, the choirs toured to Finland in August 2006. A full report will follow.
The choirs have also visited many major cathedrals in the U.K., including St Paul's, Gloucester, Worcester, Salisbury, St Albans, and have particpated in an exchange scheme with the choir of St Catherine's College, Cambridge, Worcester's sister college.
Sicily Tour Report
Worcester College Chapel Choir tour to Palermo, Sicily - December 2005
Shortly after the end of Michaelmas Term 2005, the choir set off for Palermo, Sicily, to take part in a festival of university choirs, entitled Cori in Amicizia. We were certainly in need of amicizia at the start of our journey, the coach setting off from College at 3am. After arriving in Palermo, we were shown to our accommodation before exploring the city, a melting pot of cultures ancient and modern. Sicily has at various times been part of the Norman, Turkish, and Byzantine empires, and was even occupied by the British for a time: this diversity is reflected in the Chiesa Catedrale, venue for the first concert of the festival.
The Cathedral building was a fine venue for the opening concert, combining a Norman exterior with an imposing neoclassical interior. The acoustics in such a large space are such that we were able to do justice to some characteristically English choral music, the programme that evening including Parry’s I Was Glad and Worcesterian Kenneth Leighton’s Let All the Word in Every Corner Sing. All of the other participating choirs were from Italian universities, and so it was interesting to watch the audience and other choirs react to music which is not normally sung in Italy. We in return were able to listen to the choir of Palermo University, who performed a selection of renaissance polyphonic music as well as a number of traditional Italian songs.
The following day, the festival organizers took the choir to Monreale, a small town in the hills just outside Palermo. Monreale means ‘royal mount’, a title more than borne out in its magnificent Byzantine cathedral, which contains one of the best examples of mosaic from that period in the world. The saints represented in the apse include Thomas Becket, who had been martyred shortly before the Cathedral was built. From the gallery overlooking the cloisters of the adjoining monastery we enjoyed superb views over the whole of Palermo and the surrounding area, before returning to the city for the afternoon.
The next day being free, various excursions were made both around and outside of Palermo. One group chose to sample the culinary delights of the country over a very leisurely lunch, whilst others decided to brave the Italian rail network to reach the seaside town of Cefalu. The second concert of the festival was held that evening at a small church built over the Cappuccini catacombs, which some of the more adventurous boys of the choir were keen to explore. Here we were able to listen to choirs from the universities of Florence, Bologna and Padova, again mostly performing sacred polyphony by Italian composers.
The final concert saw all participating choirs perform together in a gala concert: this was held in the beautiful Pallazo dei Normanni, another example of Sicily’s diverse architectural heritage, combining European and Turkish influences. The large hall in which the concert was held enabled us to perform Britten’s Hymn to the Virgin antiphonally, placing a small group of singers at the back of the hall. As a finale to our distinctly English repertoire we sang Gustav Holst’s setting of the festive song This Have I Done for my True Love. After an informal dinner following the concert, all of the choirs joined together in song, dancing to traditional Italian songs and attempting to find a common language in which to sing Christmas carols. In the end the only carol which everyone was able to sing was the Latin version of O Come, All Ye Faithful, giving the lie to the old cliché that Latin is a dead language. Singing Adeste Fideles seemed to summarize a tour which continually threw up meetings of the old with the new: though Italy’s choral tradition is very different from that of England, the festival was a good opportunity to celebrate the enduring appeal of sacred choral music; there could not have been a more fitting location for this than the ancient-yet-modern city of Palermo.
David Illingworth
Gloucester Cathedral and Buxton
Recent trips with th mixed choir have included singing Evensong at Gloucester Cathedral in March 2009 and a Carol Concert and Sunday Service in Buxton just before Christmas 2008.
Future trips with the mixed and boys choirs included Evensong at St. Paul's Cathrdral in London on December 14th 2009 and a concert with the choir of St. Catherine's College Cambridge at St. Paul's Knightsbridge, London on December 5th 2009.
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