2022/23 Season : Our Conductors
31 August 2022
At the end of May our current Musical Director, Lee Dunleavy,
announced that he is stepping down from the choir - after fifteen
years at the helm - as he begins training at Ripon College Cuddesdon
for priesthood in the Church of England. Over the summer the choir’s
committee have been working hard alongside Lee to adjust the planned
2022/23 season to accommodate this news.
Autumn 2022 - Lee Dunleavy
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Christmas 2022 - Chris Ouvry-Johns
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The Autumn Term of 2022 will begin with Lee Dunleavy's
final concert with us, on 15 October 2022, in a performance of
W.A. Mozart’s Coronation Mass and Exsultate, jubilate,
alongside the UK première of Marianna Martines’s Quarta Messa.
This concert sets the tone for the season Lee has curated, a season
exploring the theme “Expanding the Canon” - we hear familiar
favourites alongside unjustly neglected works by composers from a
diverse range of backgrounds. The term will conclude with our
Fanfares &
Carols Christmas matinée on 3 December 2022, which will be
guest conducted by Christopher Ouvry-Johns, Director of Music at
Leicester Cathedral.
Spring 2023 - Laura Bailie
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Spring 2023 - George Morton
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The Spring Term of 2023 will be entirely focused on a very
special performance on 18 March 2023 of Dame Ethel Smyth’s stunning
choral tour-de-force, the Mass in D. This masterpiece will be
performed in a new arrangement for reduced orchestral forces
commissioned from George Morton, to be published by Wise Music
Classical. George is a master at keeping the essence of the music in
his orchestral reductions, and we hope that this scoring will for
the first time make this great work available to the many choirs who
simply cannot afford to hire the vast orchestration of Smyth’s
original scoring. Alongside the Mass in D the concert will
include a performance of the Violin Concerto No. 1 by a composer who
knew Smyth well, Max Bruch. The concert will be guest conducted by
Laura Bailie, who recently graduated with an MA in choral conducting
from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.
Cathedral Visits 2023 - Hilary Punnett
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Summer 2023 - Simon Toyne
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The Summer Term of 2023 will welcome two guest conductors. Our
“In Sacred Spaces” programme of cathedral visits continues with
Choral Evensong in
St Paul’s Cathedral on 22 May 2023 and
Southwark Cathedral
on 3 June 2023. These services will include Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor’s Evening Service in F (he was born a stone’s throw
from St Paul’s, and lived most of his life in the Diocese of
Southwark) and the anthem will be Canadian composer Ruth Watson
Henderson’s Psalm 150. The guest conductor for these visits
is the British-Canadian choral conductor and former Organist of
Chelmsford and Lincoln Cathedrals Hilary Punnett. Our concert this
term will be on 24 June 2024 and, after an Autumn Term of music from
the classical period, and Spring Term of music from the romantic
period, we go back to the baroque for a programme of music by Handel
(Dixit Dominus), Vivaldi (Gloria), and Leonarda (Magnificat and
Sonata duodecimal), under the baton of guest conductor Simon Toyne,
Executive Director of Music of the David Ross Education Trust and
Director of the Rodolfus Foundation Choral Courses.
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