About - Portsmouth Baroque Choir

7 days ago

At our Christmas concert this year there will be lots of opportunities for you to join in with the singing. We'll be including some well-known Christmas carols, as well as Judith Weir's evocative 'My Guardian Angel', where there is a special part for the audience to sing. It's on Saturday 9 December at 7 pm at Havant United Reformed Church. Come and join us! Further details at shorturl.at/qvK25 ... See MoreSee Less

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Portsmouth Baroque Choir

3 weeks ago

Portsmouth Baroque Choir will include ten numbers from Carols for Choirs 5 in their Christmas concert on December 9th in Havant. CfC5 starts with ‘Adam lay ybounden’ in a magical setting by Howard Skempton, a miniature masterpiece. (Masterpiece, you say? Isn’t it just 1234 on a single triad throughout?). Look closely, or rather, listen closely. Skempton transforms the medieval story of Adam’s 4000 winters in limbo for the sake of a stolen apple (it must be true, as clerks wrote it down) into an unsettling, hypnotic vision in sound, a unitary tactus at raised heartbeat 112 bpm commenting on as well as accompanying the sopranos’ melody, its quirky syncopation straight out of his native Liverpool.The magic derives from subtle polyphony masked as homophony, individual words from the soprano line reflected from the top part by swapping notes in the lower voice triads, and all the while a driving urgency to the final tierce de Picardie and the prospect of escape from limbo through Christ’s intervention.Above all, as James Weeks observed (www.theguardian.com/music/2010/feb/18/howard-skempton-composer-james-weeks): “Skempton's music clears a space for us to hear sound as sound, letting the gentle play of pattern seep deeply into our consciousness. At this point, simplicity becomes marvellous, complex, astonishingly beautiful. We see familiar objects in a new light, as we'd never seen them before, transformed.” Nothing less than Morton Feldman encountering Paul McCartney in a medieval setting.A couple of good recordings:🎧ORA youtu.be/_su9cSrExgs?si=Rj9gmoGDBHrlYAQh🎧 Sixteen youtu.be/7F4HytSX0DM?si=NDAsa6d_-DrouqSCPic. Raimondi ‘Christ in Limbo with Adam and Eve’ MET DP852712.jpg ... See MoreSee Less

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Portsmouth Baroque Choir

4 weeks ago

Booking is now open for our Christmas concert on Saturday 9 December at 7 pm at the United Reformed Church in Havant. For full details see shorturl.at/qvK25 ... See MoreSee Less

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Portsmouth Baroque Choir

4 weeks ago

We enjoyed singing at St Paul's, Chichester on 21 October to an enthusiastic audience. Rehearsals are now well under way for our Christmas concert at Havant United Reformed Church on Saturday 9 December. We hope to see you there! ... See MoreSee Less

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Portsmouth Baroque Choir

1 month ago

St Paul's Church, Chichester, is our chosen venue for our concert on Saturday (7 pm) because it has two functioning organs. Richard Barnes will be playing the Afred Hunter organ at the west end, built in 1874 and restored in the 1980s, and Peter Gould the smaller organ at the east end. The sound in Louis Vierne's 'Messe solennelle' should be tremendous!Photo: Creative Commons, © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0 ... See MoreSee Less

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