Summer Pastoral

A SUMMER PASTORAL WITH EPSOM CHAMBER CHOIR

Epsom Chamber Choir invites you to join them on 27th June to welcome in summer with a programme of choral music celebrating the British countryside (with just a brief detour into Bavaria). The concert begins at 7.30pm at St Martin’s Church, Epsom.

Allow Vaughan Williams to lead you into Windsor Forest with an adaptation of his opera Sir John in Love, based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. Elgar will then take you to the Bavarian Highlands to entertain you with a set of songs inspired by his holiday there. While in Bavaria, the tenors and basses will recount the sad and lusty tale of The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, composed by Britten for a friend at a prison camp in Bavaria where it was first performed.

Back in England, listen to the cooing of The Turtle Dove (courtesy of Vaughan Williams) and admire The Oak and the Ash (take a bow, Bairstow) before taking the high or the low road to Scotland and Loch Lomond (arranged by Jonathan Quick). On the way, the sopranos and altos have their chance to shine with Paul Mealor’s I am the Still Rain Falling, written for women’s voices and hand-held percussion, and Falling Up by Cheryl Frances Hoad, both settings of appropriately pastoral poems. The men however fight back with Bushes and Briars (Vaughan Williams again). The whole programme is summed up in a duet for flute and piano by Richard Rodney Bennett, played by choir members Stella Baylis and Stephen Ridge and entitled Summer Music.

This highly-regarded choir will be directed by the choir’s award-winning conductor Jack Apperley in what will sadly be his farewell concert with the choir and will be accompanied by pianist Benjamin Frost.