Christs College choir makes appearance at Trinity

The sound of choral music will waft throughout downtown Barrie in the second week of July, imported from England, no less.

The choir of Christs College, Cambridge is soon to set out on its summer tour, starting in Montreal and ending in the Niagara region. The ensemble is making a stop here on Thursday, July 12 because, as spokesperson Simon Fraser tells BarrieToday, “We wanted to find a place in the lakes region north of Toronto to visit, and Barrie seemed a good choice because of its location and size as well as its musical connections.

“We often perform in Anglican churches, as a fair amount of our repertoire fits well within the Anglican choral tradition; that said, there should be something for all choral music lovers!”

The choir is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Cambridge, and has had a chapel choir since its foundation in 1505, during the reign of King Henry VII. The choir was originally made up solely of male voices, the upper parts being sung by boy trebles.

Even before Christs College became mixed in 1979, women were admitted from other colleges to sing the upper parts, and since then the choral sound has developed through what experts called "the quality of the female undergraduates who bring precision, sensitivity, and increasingly mature musicianship to the upper lines."

Today’s choir is widely recognized as one of “Cambridge's finest mixed-voice ensembles.”

Fraser says the core of the choir’s repertoire is what members sing for services in the chapel back home at “term-time. The repertoire for those occasions is English church music from the 16th century to the present, with pieces lasting up to five or six minutes each.”

On tour, the choir performs somewhat longer works such as Gerald Finzi’s Lo, the Full Final Sacrifice, as well as larger groups of works such as Sir Hubert Parry’s Songs of Farewell and Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia, making this predominately a 20th century concert.

Finzi produced a number of choral pieces in his short time on earth (1901-1955), not to mention cantatas for strings and solo voice, as well as concerti for cello and clarinet.

Of the Parry work, “The Songs of Farewell were written for Oxford’s Bach choir. The six pieces are all based on poetry (much of it from the British Metaphysical poets) on themes of death and eternity and they grow in complexity from two four-part settings. The whole set takes 30 minutes to perform and on tour we have split it into two parts. In Barrie, we will be performing the first four of the set.”

If Parry’s name rings a bell, it’s likely due to the celebrated Jerusalem, a William Blake poem set to music. Those who remember the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics in London will likely recall that piece.

As for Britten, known primarily for his 1945 opera Peter Grimes, Fraser says “Britten wrote many smaller-scale choral works and on tour we’re performing two – the Festival Te Deum and the Hymn to St. Cecilia. The Te Deum is not in any sense operatic in style, but has more in common with the English church style. The Hymn is a little longer – around 10 minutes and in various sections. It is set to an eccentric text by W.H. Auden and is very playful in nature.”

The concert will be conducted by Gabriel Harley, the choir’s senior organ scholar. 

The Choir of Christs College, Cambridge's Canadian tour touches down at Trinity Anglican Church, 24 Collier St. in Barrie, Thursday, July 12. For more information, click here.