There Is Sweet Music:

The English Choral Tradition, Then and Now

by Sanford Dole, Guild Chorus Music Director

picture of Craig Bohmler and Signe Boyer

Sanford Dole rehearses the Guild Chorus on the English titles for the March concert, The English Choral Tradition

As we take you on The Grand Tour this season, our next stop visits merrie olde England in a program highlighting two especially fruitful eras in British music. First, we survey early English music with works of Henry Purcell, England’s preeminent Baroque composer, and such Renaissance masters as William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, and Thomas Morley. We lead off with exquisitely crafted anthems to divine glory and follow with lighthearted madrigals about music, spring, and love, fa-la, fa-la.

Then we jump to another time rich in musical creativity, the twentieth century. From its first decade, you will hear the lush harmonies of the late-Romantic era in a motet of Charles Villiers Stanford and in Sir Edward Elgar’s song “There is Sweet Music.” We illustrate the further evolution of those harmonies through our mid-century selections, the Requiem by Herbert Howells and songs of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten. And we sample the music of century-end in John Tavener’s “Hymn to the Mother of God,” at once lavish, being scored for two six-voice choirs in canon, and spare, drawing its harmonic inspiration from Russian Orthodox music.

I am sure you will find much to savor in this bountiful offering. Each piece is among my personal favorites, and the music is quite varied with thirteen composers represented and with sacred and secular forms in roughly equal measure. We are so excited about this program that, in addition to the concerts in our regular venues in Palo Alto on March 15 and Berkeley on March 16, we have decided to present a performance in San Francisco at St. Gregory of Nyssa Church on Friday, March 14. Please tell your friends in San Francisco and the North Bay about this chance for them to hear the Guild Chorus in a beautiful and acoustically splendid venue closer to home. We would greatly appreciate your help in filling the seats at all three of our performances. As usual, this program promises to be another thrilling musical journey.

Volume 11, Issue 3

Baroque Choral Guild, 953 Industrial Ave. Ste 118, Palo Alto CA 94303, 650.424.1410