Clare College Choir University of Cambridge delighted capacity audience at MCMC
     
Clare College Choir University of Cambridge delighted a capacity audience of students, faculty and friends from Macao and Hong Kong in Moon Chun Memorial College Hall with an Open Rehearsal of its programme for forthcoming concerts in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Choir Director, Graham Ross, impressed everyone with his expertise and palpable ability to obtain the highest possible standards from the choir, whilst entertaining the audience with good humour, stagecraft and authentic musicianship.
The programme began with Gustav Holst’s Nunc Dimittis, progressed to Lili Boulanger’s Hymn to the Sun, William Byrd’s Psalm 150, and concluded with a beautifully staged performance of Robert Wylkynson’s Jesus Autem Transiens, with all 22 choristers singing from the back of the hall whilst impossibly divided into 13 voice parts. This latter composition is one of the 93 pieces in the Eton Choirbook begun circa 1500, the majority of which manuscripts still survive at Eton College UK.
MCMC Resident Fellow, Dr Peggy Lau led a reciprocal gift to Clare College Choir by performing Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness, with UM students humming the leit motif, and Clare College Choir members encouraged to improvise an obbligato part, demonstrating the true nature of collaboration between UM colleges and those of University of Cambridge.
Macao was the first port of call for this award-winning Cambridge choir, where it performed that evening for a Sung High Table, as part of its three-day residency at MCMC, with music by Wood, Hamlisch & Bayer Sager, and Rutter. |
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