Winchester and County Music Festival 2012

The first WCMF concerts took place in May-June 1922 combining Hampshire choirs which had participated in a competitive music festival. Those performances included instrumental works with (Dame) Myra Hess playing a Beethoven piano concerto. However, singing has remained at the heart of these activities and at one time over seventy choirs took part in the competitions, including ladies’ choirs, male-voice groups and school choirs.

Now in the twenty-first century we have fewer festival choirs but all are expanding healthily in numbers and tackling impressive repertoire on their own as well as in the Abbey and Cathedral events. New works and new combinations of choral items continue to challenge participants. Each season two groups of combined choirs attend three 2-hour rehearsals together ahead of the concert days. They then meet in their imposing venues with professional soloists and the Festival Orchestras. In addition, the Director of Music offers an afternoon ‘Taster Session’ to demonstrate the chosen repertoire before the combined rehearsals begin. An annual vocal workshop or ‘Come and Sing’ event open to all seven constituent choirs and their friends takes place in each Autumn term.

Ninety years after those first concerts WCMF will present a colourful French trio of sacred works in Winchester and a piece only completed in 2008 in Romsey. Bizet’s lush but rarely performed Te Deum and a St. Cecilia Mass by his one time teacher Charles Gounod will share a programme with Poulenc’s twentieth century Gloria - jazzy and lyrical by turns. In the Abbey, Dvorak’s Mass in D precedes a first local performance of the Stabat Mater by Karl Jenkins. Like the latter’s Armed Man: a Mass for Peace, sung in the Cathedral in 2009 and as a Voice for Hospices ‘Come and Sing’ in Romsey in October 2011, the new work ranges internationally in its eclectic style.