Belatedly (as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic) the Guildford Chamber Choir celebrated its 40th anniversary with a concert in Guildford’s attractive, modern United Reformed Church, the setting for the choir’s very first concert in June 1980. Three founder-members of the choir participated in the performance and their names were acknowledged in the excellently-produced programme, which included memories from one of them, Peter Terry. He, Helen Pritchard, and Tessa Forbes and tenor Mark Lee contributed effective solos in the opening item, Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb. This setting of words by the mentally-disturbed eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart is enormously effective, reflecting in turn the terrifying nature of life in an asylum and the joys produced by the poet’s devotion to the Lord but also his pet cat (beautifully evoked by soprano Helen Pritchard) and a courageous mouse (characteristically evoked by Tessa Forbes). The 30-strong choir under Max Barley conveyed the colour of the music skillfully, with a lovely mix of light, shade, and exuberant rapidity, before reaching a serene conclusion. Stephen Grahl, a former conductor of the choir, contributed the imaginative organ accompaniment.

Serenity for the most part was the mood in Vaughan Williams’s Shakespearean tribute to Sir Henry Wood. This was performed with a scaled-down instrumentation consisting of violin (Beverley Hull) and piano (Stephen Grahl). The choir sang with exquisite richness of tone, contrasting well with different groupings of soloists and concluding with a soaring top A from Miranda Johnson.

A lighter note pervaded the rest of the programme (there was no interval), in the form of George Shearing’s Songs and Sonnets. The choir sang fluently and expressively throughout the very varied Shakespearean texts and revelled in the jazzy idiom, complemented by wonderful piano playing from Stephen Grahl and up-to-the-minute bass playing from Terry Gibbs. Grahl and Gibbs also performed two very effective ‘solo’ jazz items, Shearing’s Lullaby of Birdland and Kenny Dorham’s Blue Bassa.

This delightful concert was given in aid of the Guildford Town Centre Chaplaincy which runs Guildford Street Angels, and was attended by the Mayor and her consort as well as honorary patron Michael More-Molyneux.

Shelagh Godwin (Rating *****)

The lively tones of Francis Poulenc’s Exultate Deo began the Guildford Chamber Choir’s 40th season in fine style. These virtuosic sounds exhibited a choir that has gone from strength to strength, and the fine acoustic of Holy Trinity Church enhanced some glorious music. Maurice Duruflé’s beautiful, 

Gregorian-chant-inspired Quatre Motets, calmer in mood showed to full advantage the tremendous dynamic range of the choir under their conductor Max Barley.

Pierre Villette had a direct, attractive style but with much of his teacher Duruflé’s influence, and his Hymne à la Vierge received a fine performance, indicating that the choir members had studied their French pronunciation. 

A very welcome guest was the choir’s first conductor Peter Wright, recently retired as organist of Southwark Cathedral. He gave two solo contributions: Louis Vierne’s Feux follets full of will-o’the wisp harmonies and snatches of tunes, and Jean Langlais’ Easter-Vigil-inspired Incantation pour un jour saint, which showed the Holy Trinity organ (despite its lack of French stops) to good, and loud, advantage.

The concert was given in memory of founder member Ingrid Terry who died a few months ago. Peter and the entire family were there to listen to an incomparable performance of one of Ingrid’s favourite pieces, Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine. This lovely piece sounded very effective and moving, sung as it was from memory and with the choir voices mixed up.

Ingrid’s and Peter’s daughter Annelies played a wonderful cello solo in the Pie Jesu movement from Duruflé’s well-loved Requiem, complimenting the beautiful tones of the mezzo soprano Anna Boucher. This movement is the kernel of a work which is shot through with subtle plainsong melodies to great effect. It received a performance of great integrity, with super dynamic contrasts, and Peter Wright accompanied skilfully on the organ. Martin Johnson was the excellent baritone soloist in one of the more dramatic movements, the Libera me. 

A collection was taken in aid of Headway, a Surrey charity providing therapy for adults suffering from brain injury. The Chamber Choir’s next concert will be a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion on Saturday 14th March.

Shelagh Godwin

What better way for the new conductor of the Guildford Chamber Choir, Max Barley, a noted German enthusiast, to introduce himself to local audiences than to put on a performance of Brahms’s Ein Deutches Requiem? Far from being a traditional setting of the Latin Mass for the Dead, Brahms’s music is a setting of vernacular texts from the Lutheran Bible which aptly sum up the human predicament. Apart from containing glorious music, it is a cleverly wrought piece, and the careful listener will notice the recurrence albeit varied throughout of one three-note motif near the beginning of the work.

This performance in Holy Trinity Church, in the presence of the Lord Lieutenant and his wife and in aid of Guildford Citizens Advice, was probably the first airing of Iain Farrington’s effective scoring for piano and seven woodwind and string instruments. It certainly worked in that it reflected the richness of Brahms’s orchestral score: one wished occasionally for the addition of perhaps a horn or trombone in some of the climaxes. But, led by Simon Phillips’s magnificent piano playing, the instruments did brilliantly in the resonant acoustic. There were some particularly vivid, questioning effects in the third of the seven movements: ‘Lord, make me to know my end...’

The choir sang superbly throughout, with excellent enunciation, the immaculate tuning that we have come to expect from the Guildford Chamber Choir, and with a good sense of the subtle dynamics. Soft, sustained singing at the very beginning and end of the work contrasted with the boldness of such passages as ‘But the word of the Lord endureth for ever’, or the elaborate fugue, skilfully built over a resounding pedal note, to the words: ‘The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God’. 

The soprano and baritone solos were expertly sung by the husband-and-wife team Miranda and Martin Johnson, who appropriately sang from the chorus rather than standing out at the front. Miranda’s soaring lines in ‘And ye therefore now have sorrow’ were glorious, while Martin’s depiction of the ‘last trump’ was particularly evocative. During the first half, they sang three varying Brahms songs beautifully. These performances were framed by two wonderfully crafted motets by seventeenth-century composer Heinrich Schütz, both good vehicles for the superb tone which gives this choir its reputation.

Full marks, then, to a brilliant conductor, a superb choir, and an excellent instrumental ensemble. 

Shelagh Godwin 

It was a programme suited to a damp November evening, and it drew a large audience. Since its foundation in 1980 the Guildford Chamber Choir has presented a large number of imaginative programmes. But last Saturday carried a sense of farewell: Stephen Grahl, conductor for the past eleven years, was saying goodbye.

The programme, suitably valedictory, began with the work Herbert Howells wrote after his young son’s tragic death in the 1930s. His beautifully crafted Requiem inspired full-toned, mellifluous singing from the 40-strong choir which included some lovely solos. Grahl had them in the palm of his hand as he responded to the many nuances in this wonderful work. He later conducted a performance of his own effective setting of the ancient words O nata lux; sixteenth-century composer Thomas Tallis’s setting of the same words also received a most sensitive performance, and both pieces were complemented by Howells’s evocative Master Tallis’s Testament, played on the organ by Gavin Roberts.

Wilbye’s incomparable madrigal Draw on, sweet night received a lovely performance from the choir, as did Bach’s wonderful funeral motet Komm, Jesu, Komm with its contrapuntal swirls of notes. Bach in a different guise featured in the second half. Norwegian composer Karl Nystedt adapted one of Bach’s chorales by dividing the choir into five sections and instructing each of them to sing Bach’s music at a different speed! It proved remarkably effective in the resonant acoustic of Holy Trinity Church. Bach’s Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern received a fine, joyful performance from Gavin Roberts, who gave up his seat at the organ to Stephen Grahl and moved to the piano for a remarkable piece Choral’s Dream by the French composer Thierry Escaich. I knew of no pieces for piano and organ and this was a fascinating introduction, if this particular dream was over-long. 

Morten Lauridsen’s four Nocturnes proved to be extremely effective and, together with Holst’s lovely Nunc Dimittis, inspired the choir to their best singing in the evening. Presentations and a celebratory toast with prosecco followed this concert, and a collection was taken for the Jigsaw Trust which helps people with autism. 

Shelagh Godwin

The Song of Songs, attributed to King Solomon, is a collection of evocative poetry about love. It is a wonderful vehicle for musical settings, several of which were performed by Guildford Chamber Choir at St Peter's Church in Old Woking on Saturday June 18. Conductor Steven Grahl devised the programme in an imaginative way. The love poems were interspersed with movements from two settings of the Latin Mass, beginning with Victoria's incomparable, contrapuntal Missa Vidi speciosam, which found the choir in fine form, even if some voices stuck out a bit in the dry acoustic. This was soon solved by my moving to a seat further back, when the pure blend and excellence of the choir became apparent.

Two settings of words from the Song of Songs by Palestrina were striking for their emotional fulsomeness, while Anima mea, liquefacta est by Flemish composer Orlande de Lassus was a gloriously descriptive account of the words. The choir's fluency increased as the programme progressed, through Jacob Praetorius's Surge, propera amica meaand more movements of the Victoria Mass, while organist Matthew Pickard introduced two emotionally intense Bach chorale preludes - wonderful on the church's late 19th century organ.

After the interval the choir launched into a Spanish export to Mexico, the lively Missa Ego flos campi by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, in which the more chordal textures than we had heard in the first half were backed up sensitively by the organ. Twentieth-century settings of the Song of Songs followed - Bairstow's 'Victorian' harmonies were contrasted with Walton's harmonically acerbic Set me as a seal, in which two members of the choir gave excellent solos. More acerbic still, but extremely effective, was Sebastian Forbes's My promised bride, which was performed with great skill. More conservative in style was David Bednall's Charity for solo organ, while contributions from Toronto-based Healey Willan and Cambridge-based Patrick Hadley, followed by the final movements of Padilla's Mass, concluded a wonderful evening of music.

The concert was in support of the Samson Centre for MS sufferers, and was followed by a party to mark Steven Grahl's 10 years as conductor of the choir.

Shelagh Godwin 

for the Surrey Advertiser (Friday 1 July 2016)

In view of the devastating news from Vanuatu, the Guildford Chamber Choir’s contribution to the Guildford International Music Festival had an appropriate title: Cloudburst. It was an imaginative collection of unfamiliar twentieth-century music. It began with William Mathias’s colourful settings of Songs by Shakespeare which invoked the Celtic sensitivities of the composer, as much in the evocative piano accompaniment as in the vocal lines. Particularly attractive was the movement ‘Sigh no more, ladies’, in which the men whistled expertly, helped along by a descant recorder, while the women sang.

The subsequent applause merged unintentionally with the next item, Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, a clever piece of rhythmic interaction performed by Oliver Cox and Owen Gunnell, who make up the percussion ensemble O Duo. The next piece was even more fascinating: John Cage’s Living Room Music was performed on a combination of enamel and china dishes (the acoustics of one being modified by the presence of a lemon), magazines, and newspapers set in what passed for a ‘living room’. In this O Duo were joined by the choir’s conductor Steven Grahl and pianist Gavin Roberts. O Duo’s skills as a percussion ensemble came to the fore in Searching, based on their own improvisations and played on a combination of tuned percussion instruments.

Eric Whitacre’s Three Flower Songs presented a challenge easily met by the choir, singing unaccompanied throughout and giving much attention to the intense words of Emily Dickinson, Edmund Waller, and Lorca. The choir was joined by O Duo and Gavin Roberts on the piano in William Mathias’s setting of Dylan Thomas’s extremely dark poem Ceremony after a Fire Raid. This chilling piece received a rendering of great depth.

Cloudburst is a setting by Eric Whitacre of a poem by Octavio Paz. The words talk of drought and wilderness, sung unaccompanied by the choir, and then just when you think it is going to finish, the cloudburst comes, a wonderful depiction by percussion, piano, hand bells, and finger-clicking, which had the audience spellbound.

Shelagh Godwin