It has been a few weeks since our summer concert, which was really good fun and well received by the audience! Let’s have a little recap. 🧵
We performed Adam Pounds’ London Cantata, a piece of music that was composed with us and our friends at the Academy of Great St Mary’s in mind. I hadn’t sung it before myself, but many of our current members were there for the premiere back in 2017, and we were able to return to St Mary’s to perform the revised work.
The theme of the piece is, as you might have guessed, the city of London. Adam Pounds is a Londoner himself and he wanted to explore its different aspects via poetry from the 15th to 20th century - some of the pomp and fanfare but also the industrial history of the Thames, urban life and pollution, and the oases of calm that can be found in a busy city. As Adam says, “we scratch the polished veneer of the great city and find a vast array of lifestyles, historic opulence and poverty.”
The first orchestral interlude, “The Thames at Westminster” is built around the famous Westminster Chimes.
This is particularly apt as those chimes were created in 1793 for the new clock that was installed in Great St. Mary’s church, Cambridge (home of the Academy of Great St Mary’s orchestra).
In 1851 the Cambridge graduate Edmund Beckett Denison adopted the chimes for the Palace of Westminster.
It was a great pleasure to be joined by Jonathan Holtby, a local baritone soloist who brought such lovely character to the Ghost of Shadwell Stair.
Adam uses the poem by Wilfred Owen to conjure up a bleak and lonely character. This is one of my favourite parts, as each section of the choir joins and swells with “I am the shadow that walks there”!
Stapleford Choral Society