Cantabile d’Eymet has enjoyed a remarkable year, of performance, community activities and above all of growth in the number of its singers. We now have fifty choristers, one third of which are French. The choir has also become more international, with singers from America, Belgium, the Netherlands and South Africa as well as the UK.
In our winter 2024 concert programme we sing of extraordinary, epoch-making events, of quiet moments of wonder and of the simple joys of nature at the midnight of the year, combining excerpts from Handel's towering oratorio Messiah including the famous Hallelujah Chorus with joyful seasonal pieces by Georges Bizet, Morten Lauridsen, Tim Shell, Will Inscoe and Malcolm Guite.
'To God alone the glory' wrote Handel at the end of the manuscript of Messiah, surely the most extraordinary and popular sacred oratorio of all and written in a mere 24 days in 1741 from a libretto of biblical extracts compiled by Handel's friend Charles Jenner. We perform extracts from Messiah which embody the sheer genius and range of Handel's intricate composition and musical architecture, including the Choruses For unto us a child Is born, Lift up your heads, O ye gates and Hallelujah.
Hector Berlioz’s famous oratorio L'enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ) is based on the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. The idea developed in 1850 when Berlioz composed an organ piece for his friend Joseph-Louis Duc, called L'adieu des bergers (The Shepherds' Farewell). He soon turned it into a choral movement for the shepherds saying goodbye to the baby Jesus as he leaves Bethlehem for Egypt as refugee.
Morten Lauridsen is one of the most celebrated contemporary choral composers of our time, not least his famous Magnum Mysterium which celebrates the mystery and wonder of the stable nativity stable. Lauridsen composed it in an abandoned shop on the waterfront of a remote island off Washington State where he spent his summers, describing it as “a quiet song of profound inner joy”.
The season of winter brings with it traditions of joyful celebration - walking in snowy countryside, preparing for Christmas, the wonder of Creation. We mark these traditions and what they affirm with songs from English composer Will Inscoe’s setting of Robert Louis Stephenson poem Winter Time and Malcolm Guide’s ecstatic Beginning Here; with Tim Shell’s setting of Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening; and we join St Joseph doing the laundry and baking with the angels and Mary, in an early carol from Roussillon.
The concert programme, directed by Penelope Martin-Smith is enhanced by our first collaboration with Thomas Howell as guest organist, currently studying at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in England,
Organ Scholar of Birmingham Cathedral and formerly Organ Scholar at Chichester Cathedral.
Join us at Eymet's Saint Martin des Vignes church and enter into the spirit of the winter season.