Bury Bach Choir blog

Rachel Dyson makes a welcome return to sing with the Choir Northumbrian soprano Rachel Dyson will join the Choir for our concert on Saturday 21 May at St Edmundsbury Cathedral, to sing Vivaldi’s Gloria , which she has sung previously at The Sage in Gateshead. Rachel was a member of the Estonian National Opera ensemble in Tallinn until recently. Her performances included Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro , Kalman's Die Zirkusprinzessin , Wagner’s Fliegende Hollander , Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette , Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore , Bizet’s Carmen , Puccini’s La Bohème and Tosca , and Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades . This will be Rachel’s fourth appearance with the Choir – she says ‘I’m so much looking forward to coming back to Bury St Edmunds and singing with the Choir again’. Other performances include the title role in  Patience  at the Buxton International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, as well as a ‘Pot Luck’ Pirates of Penzance in which she sang Mabel, Columbina in Lusvardi’s comic...

International star Robert Murray sings with the Bury Bach Choir We are delighted that world-renowned tenor Robert Murray will join the Bury Bach Choir for our 90 th anniversary concert on Saturday 19 March at St Edmundsbury Cathedral. He will sing the Evangelist in Bach’s St John Passion , telling the story through intricate recitative and the beautiful tenor arias.  If you came to our performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion three years ago, you will remember how movingly and brilliantly he conveyed the emotion of the piece. We are so lucky to have him to sing with us in Bury St Edmunds and it will be a performance not to be missed!  He is fitting in our concert between his debut at the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, in their new production of Peter Grimes conducted by Edward Gardner, and the Symphony Hall Boston, in Haydn’s Creation , conducted by Harry Christophers.  Robert Murray studied voice at the Royal College of Music before joining the National Opera Stu...

Bury Bach Choir singing again   Members of the Bury Bach Choir have started having socially distanced rehearsals in the Apex concert hall.  The choir numbers about one hundred members, but due to limitations imposed by the current situation fewer than forty have been able to start singing together at this stage (see photos). Nevertheless, this is a milestone after such a difficult nine months and is welcomed by the entire choir. The rehearsals are being live streamed so that those members unable to attend can join in from home. The choir’s Chair, Tess Wright, said “We are delighted to be able to start singing again, and hope soon to be able to announce details of our 2021 concert programme”. The choir’s last concert was Verdi’s Requiem, performed in St Edmundsbury Cathedral on 7 March 2020. Since then, despite not being allowed to sing together, choir members have been busy with many other activities including online voice coaching from the choir’s Co-Presidents Graeme Danby...

Videntes Stellam  – a carol by Chelsea Haward At our Christmas concert at Lavenham church on 14 December the Bury Bach Choir will sing a carol written by one of our own members, soprano Chelsea Haward.   Videntes Stellam  (seeing the star) is an ethereally beautiful depiction of the Magi bringing their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrhh to the baby Jesus. Chelsea, who was born and bred in Bury St Edmunds, read music at the University of Edinburgh for four years and followed her BMus (Hons) with an MA in Applied Psychology of Music at Leeds University, focusing on background music and how it affects cognitive performance. She has been in the choir for four years, since returning to Bury to teach piano and continue composing. ‘When I’m composing music’, Chelsea says, ‘I always use the words as my inspiration – I’m fascinated by etymology and different languages and how they link together, and how you can portray their meaning in music’. She wrote her ...

Christopher Moore – Piano four hands secondo Christopher started his musical career when he was very young: ‘my grandmother played piano, organ and violin and sat me on her knee at the piano as a baby to get me interested!’ He started piano lessons when he was eight, oboe at eleven and organ at thirteen. He worked for a firm of organ builders for a year after school and then read music at Durham University, where he played the organ a lot.    Christopher taught in schools and churches in Dorset, London and Sussex before moving to Cambridge in 1986 to take up the post of Director of Music at Great St Mary’s. This was a great challenge, he says, ‘but I enjoyed it, I built up the choirs, had a new organ, very supportive vicars, a lot of autonomy and a lot of fun! It became quite a centre for music and still is’. In 1998 Christopher moved to Sudbury while he was working as an examiner for the ABRSM, ‘because I fell in love with a beautiful old house which I had gre...

James Recknell – Piano four hands primo James was the Bury Bach Choir’s rehearsal accompanist for around ten years under its former Music Director, Fred Oxley, and rejoined us as our hugely liked and respected accompanist in the early 2000s. He regularly plays the piano, harpsichord or organ at our concerts and is accompanying the choir at our concert on 16 November for both the Choral Suite from Karl Jenkins’s  The Armed Man  and as the primo player in Brahms’s piano four-hands arrangement for  Ein deutsches Requiem . Keyboard playing has always been James’s passion and by the age of twelve he had passed his piano exams up to Grade VII. James went on to study music at Cambridge University and took lessons on the new harpsichord at Magdalen College. His first teaching job was in maths, and James thinks ‘there is definitely a correlation between music and maths, I did both at ‘A’ level – I suppose it’s to do with the analytical part of the brain’. While he ...