Our next concert on Saturday 19th March at St Teresa’s church in Colchester takes us back to Renaissance and Baroque Italy, with a programme of seasonal Passiontide music. The main work is Leonardo Leo’s double choir Miserere – a fascinating work with organ and bass continuo, much admired by both Verdi and Wagner and which eclipsed Allegri’s famous setting holding sway in Italy for over a hundred years. Also in the programme will be three wonderful settings of the Crucifixus by the Venetian Lotti, three of Gesualdo’s amazing Tenebrae Responsaries from the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday sets and Palestrina’s great double choir Stabat Mater, written for the Papal Julian chapel.

Seasons Greetings! Thank-you for your support in 2015 and we look forward to seeing you in the New Year.

We launched our autumn 2015 season with an open rehearsal
and four short performances in Colchester town centre on
Saturday 12th September as part of Heritage Days 2015, when more than 30 venues were open to the public.
We started with an hour-long ‘open rehearsal’ in the foyer at the Firstsite gallery, followed by short recitals there, at The Minories gallery, the Castle Museum and finally at Holy Trinity Church. Some listeners were so entranced that they followed the choir from venue to venue and several commented that they were pleased to have been introduced to the choir this way.
And the choir enjoyed it too!

£2,500 RAISED

We sang in 28 churches, had a wonderful time and raised money, half of which we have donated to the Friends of Essex Churches Trust for the restoration of historic churches, and half of which is being devoted to the support of young musicians.

With now less than a month to our concert in St. Edmundsbury Cathedral I thought it might be worth writing a little about our programme.
As the 22nd of November is St. Cecilia’s Day we thought it appropriate to celebrate the Patron Saint of Music with ‘music that celebrates music’. The programme will start with Lassus’ stunning 6 part Musica dei Donum, a piece written in praise of music and its ability to calm the senses. This will lead into a blazing processional piece for choir, brass and organ by the Belgian composer Flor Peeters, Entrata Festiva. Peeters wrote much music in particular for the organ and his style fuses earlier baroque and even renaissance techniques into a tonal 20th century musical language. A second work by Peeters, Canticum Gaudii, written for the same forces will end the concert. There then follow two pieces by the English renaissance composer, Peter Philips, proper to the feast of St. Cecilia. Cantantibus Organis is probably his best known work but the magnificent 8 part Cecilia Virgo (reminiscent of Gabrieli) has only been revived in recent years. The first part of the concert will end with the British première of Emile Naoumoff’s Concerto Sacré. This piece is essentially a concerto for piano and choir. The composer uses the words of the Latin Mass but in no way is this a liturgical piece. For example the Sanctus movement is placed after the Gloria and before the Credo to create a palindromic structure of short-long-short-long-short movements with the Sanctus at its centre. Naoumoff creates some wonderful effects – bells and cascades of shimmering notes in the piano part, chanting and organum in the choral writing. There are passages of meditative introspection and exuberant, even ecstatic, outpourings of praise.
The second half of the concert will begin with one of Giovanni Gabrieli’s Canzonas for brass in four parts, which will lead into his mighty 19 part motet Buccinate which exhorts us to ‘Blow the trumpet’ and to praise God with strings, organ, drums and voices. The major work in the second half is Kodaly last work Laudes Organi. Written in 1966 this work praises the organ and the choir that sings with it. In its turn, it is a concerto for organ and choir.
I am sure you will enjoy all the music which is dramatic, emotional and yet very accessible. We look forward to seeing you there.
Roderick Earle

On 13 September, thirty singers from Colchester Chamber Choir will be launching the Choral Steeplechase. They will visit as many churches as possible around Colchester and North Essex, and in each one will sing a short unaccompanied work from their repertoire of sacred and secular classics.
The venture is part of the wider ‘Ride and Stride’ fund-raising event, with one important difference. Instead of individual singers cycling between churches, the choir as a whole will race between steeples to see how many churches it can perform in. Sadly, it would be too unwieldy for the choir to cycle between venues, so it will rely instead on sharing cars for transport, and put its energies into singing a piece in each church. Each singer from the choir will seek sponsors, who will pay an agreed sum for each church/chapel visited on Saturday 13 September.
The money raised through sponsorship will be split equally between the Friends of Essex Churches Trust, a body established in 1951 which makes grants to historic churches and chapels of all Christian denominations and Colchester Chamber Choir which will use the sponsorship funds to help support young singers and musicians at the start of their careers.
If you want to sponsor us you can make a secure donation by following this link
or you can email info@colchesterchamberchoir.org
If you would like to see us on our travels you can view our itinerary here. We would love to see you!

Colchester Chamber Choir was delighted to be featured in the Meet My Choir slot on Radio 3’s The Choir programme on Sunday 11th May.