For most British people, the Christmas season is inextricably linked with the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, broadcast live from King's College, Cambridge, every Christmas Eve on both TV and radio. While the King's College Chapel Choir is the best known of the Oxford and Cambridge College Choirs, it is generally unknown that virtually all of the nearly 70 colleges have their own choir.
The Choir of Gonville and Caius College.
Some colleges, continuing a tradition that goes back nearly a thousand years, retain all-male choirs, consisting of university students and boys with unbroken voices, who come from choir schools attached to the college: King's and St John's at Cambridge, for example, and Christ Church, New College and Magdalen at Oxford. Others, like Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, have a mixed choir of male and female students. The College, generally known just as Caius College, is the fourth oldest in Cambridge, founded in 1348, now has about 700 students.
The College's celebrated choir gave a remarkable concert at Bangkok Art & Culture Centre last Friday on the theme of Ave Maria (Hail Mary) -- very appropriately, as for 200 years, from the 14-16th centuries the college was known as 'Hall of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary'. The concert was all the more astonishing as the choir's flight from Singapore was delayed and only landed at Suvarnabhumi airport at 4.30pm, and, with the concert due to start at 7.30pm, the choir arrived at the venue at 6.45 pm.
But their performance, from the very start, showed no signs of this hectic journey, as they sang a selection of some of the most beautiful choral music ever written, such as Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, Gounod's Ave Maria and César Franck's Panis Angelicus (tenor soloist, Robert Humphries) along with lesser-known works, spanning the 15th (Song Of The Nuns Of Chester) to the 21st centuries, and many well-loved carols, such as Ding-Dong Merrily On High and The Holly And The Ivy.
The exceptionally well-trained choir of 12 performed pieces involving different combinations of voices, sometimes unaccompanied, and sometimes accompanied by organ (James Leitch) and solo cello (Pollyanna Furness). There were many highlights. In the first half these included two rarely heard motets by the 16th century English composer Peter Phillips, and a haunting lament by Henry Purcell on the death of Queen Mary in 1694, sung by Pollyanna Furness and Billie Robson.
After the interval, John Gowers was the dramatic and vigorous bass soloist in the Boar's Head Carol, and among more modern pieces was the intriguing, Good Day, Sir Christemas, by former Caius student Cheryl Frances-Hoad. She was commissioned to write the piece by the BBC Music Magazine, and it is a fun-filled gem which must be a delight to sing, full of jokes, false relations, and jaunty changes in time signature. The programme finished with Peter Warlock's exuberant Benedicamus Domino, and, as the encore demanded by the enthusiastic audience, O Little Town Of Bethlehem.
It was an evening of exceptionally high quality singing, and, with a choir whose student membership is constantly changing, as new students arrive and older students leave, the responsibility and credit for maintaining such a wonderful standard lies firmly with the choir's director, Dr Geoffrey Webber. It was a wholly enjoyable occasion, and for many in the audience, deeply nostalgic.
Michael Proudfoot is a British writer on opera and a former Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Reading.
