This Sunday, July 2, at noon, Newcastle's newest choir, the Festival Chamber Choir, will offer a prelude to upcoming Newcastle Music Festival, celebrating the power of voices and place at Christchurch Cathedral.
The choir's centrepiece is choral music by Johann Sebastian Bach.
The Festival Chamber Choir is a group of 14 singers, led by well-known bariton singer Chris Allan.
Allan has been involved in choral singing and instruction for many years in Newcastle and beyond.
The singers - sopranos Georgina Cole, Georgi Laney. Emma Vile and Caroline Hill; altos Anthea Harrington, Paul Tenorio, Kim Sutherland and Julie Bevan; tenors Paul Bevan, Paul Morris and Dan Wheeler; and bass singers Greg Kerr, Max Reeder, and Jordan Wett, with Chris Allan as director -perform a capella, which means without the accompaniment of any instruments.
The concert includes works by Renaissance composers Vittoria and Palestrina, as well as Johann Sebastian Bach, and two composers from the Romantic period of the 19th century, Bruckner and Stanford.
Palestrina and Bach are two of the four composers whom Felix Mendelssohn regarded as the greatest of all time, along with Beethoven and Mozart.
The centrepiece of the concert is Bach's great motet, Lobet den Herrn, BWV230, flanked by four movements of Palestrina's Missa Aeterna Christi munera.
Chris Allan described what it is like for a choir to sing these works, with only their own voices as guides: "For a choir this is about extending your awareness... and finding the places where the musical lines intersect. The Bach motet is an example of the complexity of the music of the High Baroque. The sheer scale of the piece is way beyond the works of Vittoria and Palestrina, which represent the height of the Renaissance. Bach's music is always exciting to sing - like being on a high wire with no net!"
The musical works to be performed are all perfectly suited to the space, since the works have religious references and texts. But with all due acknowledgement of the Cathedral's religious importance, it is for its acoustic properties that it is so sought after as a venue for music performance.
