Festival Singers 2021 plans

Thanks for visiting our website.

We have resumed 7:00pm Monday night rehearsals at Newlands Christian Assembly 126 Newlands Road, Newlands, Wellington

If you are looking for a choir to sing with in 2021 we’d love hear from you.

Here is a summary of our plans for the remainder of 2021:

• Mass Appeal concert: Chilcott: A Little Jazz Mass — Dvorák : Mass in D major

  3:00pm Sunday 23 May 2021. St James Anglican Church, Lower Hutt.
  Book at Eventbrite

• Starlit Night concert: Early July

Matariki themed concert featuring: Seek Him That Maketh the Seven Stars by Jonathan Dove

• Ceremony of Carols Christmas Concert:
  20 November 2021 more details to follow

Featuring Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, with Michelle Velvin harpist.

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Our next Concert

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Documentary Video about making the recording of A Hopkins Gloria

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Composer’s note:

A Hopkins Gloria was initially premiered at a concert that included two other Glorias, by Vivaldi and by John Rutter. In the back of my mind were Classical and Baroque “cantata-masses” like Vivaldi’s Gloria, where each fragment of the (Latin) text is spun out into a complete movement. I was tempted in this direction, but decided at length to set the text in English (mostly the version in A New Zealand Prayer Book) – partly because most of the rest of the concert was in Latin. And as soon as I had made that decision, I felt that I couldn’t repeat each clause indefinitely, treating them as tokens to fill out abstract musical designs, but had to regard the text (or at least larger sections of it) as meaningful wholes.

Then I had an idea. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty (“Glory be to God for dappled things…”) came into my head, which I had attempted without success to set at various times over the last twenty-five years. I thought of ‘inhabiting’ this canonical text with other, related texts (“and the birds of the air shall make their homes in its branches…”). It occurred to me that one of Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets, written out of his blackest depression, could make a useful counterpoint to the Agnus Dei sections; then I wondered if the second half of his “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” might work as a way of bringing about a return to the joyful mood of the whole.

So there is a kind of spiritual drama, a dark night of the soul, at the heart of the piece. And it may be worth saying that the emotional dynamic of this section – the attempt to soothe and manage dark imaginings in the early hours of the morning by repetition of the Agnus Dei prayer – is, quite literally, something that has been a regular part of my spiritual life. I do believe, somehow, that joy will have the final word; but suffering and resurrection have to happen first.

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  For more information, please contact:

• Ingrid Schoenfeld (Musical Director)
  ingrid.s@outlook.co.nz, 027 240 6669  or

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• Philip Garside (Secretary)
  books@pgpl.co.nz  475 8855

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