Chamber Choir entertains on a sultry evening

Guildford Chamber Choir – Holy Trinity Church, Guildford – 28th June 2025

The doors were open, but the traffic on the High Street outside Holy Trinity was mercifully light as the Guildford Chamber Choir opened their summer concert on Saturday 28th June with an appropriate piece for a summer evening, the mediaeval round Sumer is icumen in. This was sung in the round, with the choir members spaced out along the side aisles to great effect.

They then moved to the usual performance space in front of the screen for a couple of remarkable madrigals, Morley’s lively Now is the month of maying preceding Weelkes’s extraordinary and descriptive Thule, the period of cosmography and its equally exciting partner The Andalusian merchant. Choral tone and co-ordination were excellent in all of these, and the performances under conductor Joanna Forbes L‘Estrange were suitably vivid and lively.

The singers then had a rest while the highly talented Coull Quartet performed Frank Bridge’s Three Idylls, all mini-masterpieces and skillfully performed.

As a contrast from the Elizabethan madrigals, the choir performed jazzy settings of Elizabethan poems by the contemporary (and ex-King’s Singer) composer Bob Chilcott. These lively settings, laced with humour and much enjoyed, were accompanied by the brilliant Marion Windham Jazz Trio in a thrilling ensemble.

And so to the climax, a performance of Forbes L’Estrage’s A Season to Sing. This clever vocalization of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons suited the choir’s capabilities wonderfully, and provided a change from the oft-performed original Vivaldi work. Sandwiched between settings from the Bible (mostly Ecclesiastes) the twelve movements were set to words ranging from the Renaissance Thomas Morley to the romantic poet and novelist Emily Brontë, and including some psalm settings and a poem by Vivaldi himself invoking winter. Here the choir sang short sharp notes as though shivering. The virtuoso depiction of the summer storm was brilliantly executed, as was the illustration of falling autumn leaves rather than the asthmatic Vivaldi’s evocation of an exhausted, hunted stag. Throughout the Coull String Quartet and bassist Marianne Windham played with great aplomb. At a time when the world is in turmoil the ending, invoking peace with some tremendous harmonies, was indeed appropriate.

The concert was in aid of the Cheryl King Trust (chaired by double bassist Marianne Windham) which funds music lessons for underprivileged schoolchildren.

Shelagh Godwin