Join the Solway Singers for their upcoming spring concert, ‘For the Beauty of the Earth’, to be held at The Parish Church of St Cuthbert, Carlisle on Saturday 17 May at 7.30pm. They will be performing a range of contemporary choral classics based on the texts of familiar hymns and psalms by leading British composers.
The concert features music by Sir John Rutter in the year when he celebrates his 80th birthday, including his ‘Psalmfest’, a nine-movement choral work based on a selection of joyful and uplifting psalms, and his ever-popular anthem ‘For the Beauty of the Earth’.
There is another chance to hear Bob Chilcott’s ‘Be Thou My Vision’ which the Solway Singers performed recently at the Carlisle and District Festival of Music & Drama. Also, William Mathias’s ‘Let all the People Praise Thee O God’, commissioned for the royal wedding in 1981, and Will Todd’s powerful and impressive ‘O Lux Beata’, based on a 4th century hymn to the Trinity ascribed to St Ambrose of Milan.
James McMillan’s ‘A New Song’ is a setting of Psalm 96 and is a striking fusion of different influences: Scottish folk music, bagpipes, Gaelic psalmody, and plainsong. And David Briggs’ Ubi Caritas et amor is a beautiful setting of a mediaeval French text in Latin: ‘Where charity and love are, God is there’.
It promises to be a most rewarding evening of sacred choral music.
