Close Harmony Recital at the Abbey Festival

Sherborne School’s Chamber Choir, comprised of some twenty tenors and basses and directed by James Henderson, performed to a public audience of 200 in the Abbey on Saturday morning as part of the Abbey Festival. The choir performed some of its sacred repertoire in the first half, arranged in many cases specifically for Sherborne School Chamber Choir in TTBB from the original SATB settings. Dividing at times into six or eight parts, the resulting sonority of the choir is unusual across much of the rest of the world - except for in Wales where there continues to be something of a tradition of men’s voice singing! Repertoire in this recital included men’s voice arrangements of Byrd’s Ave Verum, Bairstow’s Let all mortal flesh keep silence, Eccard’s When to the temple Mary went and Bruckners’ Locus iste.

In the second half of the recital the choir became "Sherborne Close Harmony", whose tenor and bass sound is ideally suited to the light arrangements of Sinatra and other numbers presented by the group with some wonderfully stylish piano accompaniments by Benjamin Davey (Assistant Director of Music and Head of Keyboard). Amongst favourites were You’re Getting To Be A Habit With Me, Yellow Bird, Belle of the Ball, New York! New York!, Sailing By and Some Enchanted Evening.

Tenors: Ben Armstrong, Theo Beeny, Henry Delamain, Robert Folkes, William Glasse, Jack Miller, Edward Pyman, Harry Reynolds, Mr Iain Smith, Alexander Stagg

Basses: Tom du Val de Beaulieu, Henry Chadwick, William Ellis, Nicholas Glasse, Robert Ham, Eunseog Lee, Philip Loosemore, Sandy May, Edward Smith, Nicholas Toomey

Posted: Wednesday, May 9, 2012