Choir Back with Star Conductor
Colchester’s newest choral ensemble is back along with its international opera singer director.
Direct from a leading role on the operatic stage at the Adelaide Festival, Australia, Roderick Earle takes up the baton to conduct the Colchester Chamber Choir for its second concert this weekend.
Roderick started his career as a chorister at Winchester Cathedral before going on to study at St John’s College of Cambridge. His choral career continued with a number of major professional choirs, such as the BBC Singers, the London Sinfonietta and the Monteverdi Choir.
He said: “I wanted to rediscover those wonderful, spiritually-uplifting works that I sang, and sometimes conducted, at that time, and to perform them with a carefully rehearsed, handpicked small choir that I knew could rise to the challenge.” Another aim was to introduce audiences to less frequently-heard music, often by composers better known for larger-scale works, and that’s what he hopes this second concert will do.
Entitled Two Worlds, Choral Treasures from Europe and America, it will open with an unaccompanied Ave Maria by the 19th-century Italian Giuseppe Verdi, followed by pieces from such composers as Byrd, Philips, Mozart, Bruckner and Grieg. The second half is devoted to the work of 20th-century American composers like Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber.
Colchester Chamber Choir
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