St Wulfram’s Church Choir, Grantham, a major choral foundation with thriving children’s and teenage youth choirs, is in residency at Ely Cathedral between Monday 1 and Sunday 7 August. The choir, which recently sang at Westminster Abbey, will sing Choral Evensong in the cathedral at 5.30pm on the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. St Wulfram’s Church Choir will complete the residency by singing the cathedral’s Sunday services on 7 August.
During the residency, the choristers will be offering two lunchtime recitals.
On Thursday 4 August, the choristers will be travelling to Cambridge, and the teenage youth choir (a mixed-choir ensemble of singers aged between 13 and 17) will perform a lunchtime recital in Little St Mary’s Church at 1pm. The concert will last for an hour: it is free entry, and a retiring collection will be taken and split between St Wulfram’s Church Choir fund and Little St Mary’s Church. The teenagers, almost all of whom were first trained as boy and girl choristers at St Wulfram’s, will present a programme of sacred music including Renaissance polyphony (Palestrina, Tallis), but also including some contemporary classics (including by Ola Gjeilo, Sarah MacDonald, Gail Randall, and a choral arrangement of Laura Mvula’s Sing to the Moon).
On Friday 5 August, it is the turn of the younger boy and girl choristers, who will present a free lunchtime recital in St Peter’s Church, Ely at 1pm. The concert will last for an hour: it is free entry, and a retiring collection will be taken for St Peter’s Church. The choristers will present a programme of sacred music, ranging from 1,000-year-old chants by Hildegard of Bingen to music of the present day, including by Roxana Panufnik and Joanna Forbes L’Estrange.
We are really looking forward to both of these performances, and we hope to encourage many people to come and hear the beautiful ‘St Wulfram’s sound’.
