Choristers gather for huge Cartmel Priory performance (From The Westmorland Gazette)

Choristers gather for huge Cartmel Priory performance

8:40am Tuesday 27th December 2011 in Music news By Adrian Mullen, Arts correspondent

ONE of the biggest choral gatherings of 2011 brings the year to a glorious close on New Year’s Eve.

More than 100 of the region’s finest choristers team up under the Cumbria Choral Initiative banner for a massive performance at Cartmel Priory.

Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens (4-part version); Brahms’ How Lovely are Thy Dwellings Fair (from the Requiem) and Faure’s Cantique de Jean Racine are among the pieces earmarked for Saturday’s performance, which runs from 11.15pm until midnight.

The concert starts with a ‘Come and Sing’ from 8pm-10pm, leading up to the later performance.

There will be no admission charge but donations will be gratefully received for the Sing Out for Marie Curie appeal.

Once again, clad in white tuxedo and wielding the CCI baton will be Ian Jones with another leading light in Cumbrian choral circles, Adrian Self, at the organ.

Ian said he was “very much looking forward to the performance.”

CCI’s December 31 event heralds an exciting 2012 for the forward-thinking choral outfit, which is committed to keeping choral singing in Cumbria in a healthy and vibrant state and encourage young people to take up or continue choral singing.

The next CCI concert will be on July 28 at Ulverston’s Coronation Hall, performing The Song of Hiawatha as part of Lake District Summer Music.

The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor trilogy - Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha’s Departure - is rarely performed and Ian said that CCI had decide to perform the piece because 2012 was the centenary of the composer's death.

Ian pointed out that SCT was closely involved with the Mary Wakefield Festival in the early years of the 20th Century and conducted the Song of Hiawatha in the 1901 Festival with a chorus of 600. Adrian Self's father, Geoffrey, was also the composer's biographer.

The work was hugely popular in the first few years of the century then fell out of fashion, later revised by Malcolm Sargent in the 1930s, which led to annual performances in the Albert Hall, staged, with dancers (one of whom, now over 100, is the aunt of one of the chorus) chorus and orchestra and audiences of thousands turning up in Native American Indian regalia.

Added Ian: “The words are by Longfellow who was a great supporter and devotee of the American Indians and was very aware of their suffering at the hands of the settlers. Coleridge Taylor, who was himself black and had experienced racial abuse, was very much drawn to this poem because of his sympathy for their cause. Although the piece does not have an overt political message the final section in particular (Hiawatha's Departure) reflects the sadness of the suffering the American Indians experienced.”

CCI will be joined by the Northern Chamber Orchestra, a distinguished cast of soloists, including Nicholas Hurndall Smith and David Kempster.