Save the date for Chandos' next concert
Book now for Power and Peril on Thursday 22 October
Chandos Chamber Choir’s autumn concert reflects on the dangerous and seductive nature of leadership and power, through music inspired by many sources and set by composers from the Tudor period to the present day. Book now to benefit from our early bird prices.
English (and British) history provides rich inspiration for our featured composers, with the tumult of the seventeenth century reflected in works by John Dowland, Thomas Weelkes and John Powell. These trace the progression from the reign of Elizabeth I, through James VI (of Scotland) and I (of England), to Oliver Cromwell who served as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland after playing a key role in winning the English Civil War. Navigating the disparate and passionately held views of these leaders whilst leaving one’s loyalty in no doubt would have been no mean feat.
Cromwell at the Battle of Naseby by Charles Landseer, 1851
Another section of our repertoire comes from the Bible. Giaches de Wert’s Vox in Rama describes how Rachel weeps for her “children”: those who have been killed or taken captive by the Babylonians after the sacking of Jerusalem. This story is also interpreted as a foreshadowing of King Herod’s massacre of the innocents. We also compare two settings of When David Heard which describes the culmination of intra-familial conflict within King David’s family. Thomas Tomkins’ version brings the story to life through the conventions of Tudor polyphony, whereas Eric Whitacre’s interpretation evokes the unrestrained emotion of David’s response to hearing that his son has been killed.
Shakespeare is the third main source of inspiration as we draw from Jaakko Mäntyjärvi’s 4 Shakespeare Songs, in particular Double, Double Toil and Trouble, the well-known scene from Macbeth where the three witches prophesy that Macbeth will become King of Scotland. And we bring our overview of the pitfalls of untrammelled power into the twentieth century with Benjamin Britten’s 1939 work Advance Democracy which was commissioned by the London Co-operative Society as a propaganda piece to promote democracy in the wake of the Munich Agreement.
Three Witches, MacBeth, by James Henry Nixon (1831)
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