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Merton SingFest 2024
St Mark's Church, Wimbledon
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Brandenburg Choral Festival 2018

In the past couple of years, Wimbledon Choral Society has been promoting the art of the choral anthem in a series of concerts entitled Anthemfest here in the UK and also as part of its highly successful tour to Estonia in May 2017.   The next concert in the series where you can have the opportunity to hear some of the most beautiful and stirring choral anthems ever written will be on Saturday 20th January 2018 in the church of St Katharine Cree, in the City of London near The Gherkin building.   The concert is part of the well-established Brandenburg Spring Choral Festival that takes place in venues all over London, this year running from December 2017 through to May 2018.
 
The anthem is an Anglican invention, the protestant equivalent of the Latin motet used in the Catholic Church. The earliest anthems were contrapuntal, unaccompanied and were effectively motets but with English words.  After the Restoration (1660), Charles II demanded a brighter, accompanied style of anthem, like the church music that he had heard while in exile.  As the nineteenth century progressed, anthems became much more substantial, in effect becoming mini church cantatas, and lasting up to twenty minutes. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have also seen many fine examples of anthem writing. In this concert Wimbledon Choral Society presents anthems representing these different eras. The earliest piece is If ye love me by Thomas Tallis, composed in the 16th Century, and the most recent is Will Todd's Christus est Stella written in 1999.
 
Wimbledon Choral Society (WCS) is over one hundred years old, having been founded in the early stages of the First World War. It celebrated its 2014-15 centenary season in style, including a performance of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem to a 2000-strong audience in the Royal Festival Hall. To mark its centenary, WCS has commissioned the Da Vinci Requiem from award-winning composer Cecilia McDowall.   This will be premiered on Tuesday 7th May 2019, also at the Royal Festival Hall. WCS's roots remain firmly in its local community.  October 2017 saw the launch of the first ever Merton choral festival, SingFest, in collaboration with Merton Music Foundation and Wimbledon’s new professional choir, Sonoro. The event saw more than a thousand local adults and children sharing in the joy of singing.
 
Click here to see the full concert programme.
Click here to book tickets for this event.   To get £3 off each adult ticket, use discount code CHOIR1 when prompted.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     (above) Neil Ferris
 
     (left) WCS in concert - Southwark Cathedral
 
     
     
Posted: 19:38:20 - 02/12/2017

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