CHAPEL CHOIR

66

The Choir continues to flourish in both quality and number, and this year we welcomed Theo Williamson as Junior Organ Scholar along with another strong tranche of singers. We remain intensely grateful to the Chaplain, the Reverend Graham Stevenson, for his unstinting support of the Choir’s activities.

Senior Organ Scholar Anna Sozańska’s earthy, powerful setting of the College Grace drew the ear at the Reunion and Matriculation Dinners. Weekly Sung Evening Prayer on Sunday evenings has been, as usual, supplemented by special services linked to the liturgical year and to College events, as well as by termly choral Compline and Taizé services which broaden the flavours of worship offered in the Chapel very pleasingly. The Choir’s repertoire continues to broaden and to diversify. Kerry Andrew’s haunting Before the ending of the day has become a particular favourite of the choir, and the challenge posed by Roxana Panufnik’s Deus est caritas, with its demanding moto perpetuo organ accompaniment, was surmounted by all involved with flair and panache. We have been immensely fortunate to have a new evening service written for and dedicated to ‘Catherine Groom and the Choir of Fitzwilliam College’ this year by Ivor Novello Award nominee Bernard Hughes. The setting is distinctive and subversive, and we’re thrilled to add it to our repertoire.

In October the Choral Scholars joined violist and harpsichord colleagues of Music Fellow Francis Knights for a concert of contemporary composition for early instruments entitled Dances, dirges and devotions, performing two Tallis motets exquisitely. Individual members of the choir excelled themselves in two FCMS recitals of solo arias and duets presented by members of the choir and accompanied by the Organ and Répétiteur Scholars. In November, the Choir joined the Chapel Choir of Emmanuel College and the Orpheus Sinfonia for a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius at Hampstead Parish Church as part of Hampstead Arts Festival, with soloists Aiden Coburn and Jessica Dandy. The usual festive round of Advent Carol Service, Christmas concert and local carol-singing in aid of Wintercomfort was added to this year by a Christmas concert for the Master’s Circle of Benefactors, instigated by the Development Office and enjoyed immensely by the Choir. Repertoire included Thomas Hewitt Jones’s luminously lovely setting of What child is this?

In February, we joined the Chapel Choirs of St. Catharine’s, Corpus Christi and Girton Colleges for a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 at West Road Concert Hall, with the City of Cambridge Symphony Orchestra. The date of the concert fell on the day after Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, and the rendition of the Ode to Joy was an emotive experience for many in the hall, which was packed to capacity and blue and yellow throughout. In fact, February was a busy month, also involving joint Evensongs with the Chapel Choirs of Peterhouse and of our Oxford sister College St. Edmund Hall, both here at Fitz.

The May 2020 iteration of Fitzwilliam Chamber Opera in Mozart’s Così fan tutte (for which the Choir will, as usual provide the chorus and some of the principals), the planned July 2020 tour to Rome, and a CD recording produced in collaboration with the extraordinary Fitz Gardening team and based on the theme of the changing light and seasons brought into the Chapel by the vast plane tree outside our great glass window, are all, alas, postponed, but emphatically not abandoned.

We look forward to all of those good things, and more, in due course.

Catherine Groom

Director of Music