A Joyful Company of Singers.
Don't miss this award-winning choir singing in Northumberland this weekend.
The work of Beadnell-based poet, broadcaster and local historian Katrina Porteous features in the forthcoming tour by the award-winning Joyful Company of Singers, one of Britain’s leading amateur choirs.
Directed by Peter Broadbent MBE, who formed the choir in 1988, they sing in Wooler on Saturday 4th May and in Alnwick on Sunday 5th May.
Their two concerts are related but different, adding Northumbrian flavours to a musical menu of choral works about the sea, voyages of many kinds and life’s transitions.
The choir opens the 2024 Wooler Arts Summer Concerts series with a programme entitled Far from Land at St Mary’s Church, Wooler on Saturday 4th May at 7.30pm.
The centrepiece of the concert is Wooler-based composer John Casken’s Uncertain Sea, interleaving two poems by Katrina Porteous - one featuring the words of the late Redford Armstrong, an Amble fisherman, in Northumbrian dialect - to evoke the sea and those who brave its dangers.
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John Casken says, ‘The powerful sea images of Katrina’s wonderful poems have drawn from me music that I count as some of my most personal.’ Casken’s music is already known in Bamburgh through the installation ‘Memorial Bells’ which took place in St Aidan’s Church in November.
The next day, the choir performs Transitions at St Paul’s RC Church, Alnwick on Sunday 5th May at 7pm. Katrina Porteous joins them to read some of her works interspersed with the choir’s pieces. Katrina will read new work as well as old, including poems from her forthcoming Bloodaxe collection, Rhizodont, which explores the deep history of the Northumberland coast, human and natural.
As well as John Casken’s music, other composers include James MacMillan and John Tavener – the choir performs his Song for Athene, which made such an impact at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.
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On a lighter note, both concerts include choral arrangements of folksongs related to the sea by Vaughan Williams, and Northumbrian folk-song settings by W G Whittaker - Newcastle-born friend and walking companion of Holst and Vaughan Williams - and Derek Hobbs, formerly head of music at Ashington High School and arranger of Singin’ Hinnies.
In addition to their two main evening performances, the choir will be giving free half-hour ‘taster concerts’ at local tourist venues: •
Ad Gefrin, the Anglo-Saxon Museum and Whisky Distillery in Wooler, on 4th May at 2.15pm
The Alnwick Garden on 5th May at 1.45pm To complete a busy schedule for the Singers, a ‘mini-choir’ will spend a day working with the children of St. Michael’s CofE Primary School and Swansfield Park Primary School in Alnwick. In co-operation with their Headteachers, Music Teachers and St. Michael’s ceilidh band and instrumentalists, the children will have fun exploring some of the musical ideas associated with the Alnwick concert and Uncertain Sea.
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All are welcome to the Joyful Company of Singers’ public concerts - for full details of the tour, including ticketing links, visit their website www.jcos.co.uk.