{"id":443104,"date":"2026-09-21T16:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T16:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/443104\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T16:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T16:46:10","slug":"splendid-singing-in-dallas-from-choir-of-trinity-college-cambridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/443104\/","title":{"rendered":"Splendid singing in Dallas from Choir of Trinity College Cambridge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Starting in the 1960s, recordings, broadcasts and tours by English cathedral and collegiate choirs came as a revelation to many American choral directors. The clear, more open sonorities of those men-and-boys choirs, as they were then, were quite a change from American approaches that welcomed vibrato in choirs.<\/p>\n

Boys, of course, don\u2019t naturally sing with vibrato, but with relatively \u201cstraight\u201d tone. Today, with boys\u2019 voices changing earlier, and with more resistance to ensembles perceived as sexist, formerly all-male English choirs increasingly mix in girls, or use adult women for top parts. But the minimal-vibrato approach has prevailed, and it\u2019s adopted by many American choirs.<\/p>\n

The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge<\/a>, which presented a concert Sunday evening at Church of the Incarnation, was a men-and-boys outfit until 1982 \u2014 several years after the college first admitted female students. Conducted by director Steven\u00a0Grahl, the mixed-voice ensemble of 32 now on a U.S. tour proved its professional bona fides in a program including some very challenging repertory. Mostly English, it ranged from the 16th century to the 21st.<\/p>\n

Judith Weir\u2019s 2003 setting of the e.e. cummings poem \u201ca blue true dream of sky\u201d deftly contrasted a soprano and two altos in the church\u2019s rear balcony with the balance of the choir at the crossing. Her \u201cLove bade me welcome,\u201d to the George Herbert poem, answered higher-voiced self doubts with assurance from lower voices.<\/p>\n

Kenneth Leighton\u2019s 1957 \u201cGod\u2019s Grandeur\u201d underlined the ambiguities of Gerard Manley Hopkins\u2019 poem in dramatic harmonic stresses and contrapuntal complexities. Jonathan Harvey\u2019s \u201cI love the Lord,\u201d from 1976, challenged an insistent G major chord with harmonic crunches of pain and death.<\/p>\n

The Dallas connection to Herbert Howells\u2019 \u201cTake him, earth, for cherishing\u201d went unmentioned. \u00a0Commissioned as a tribute to President John F. Kennedy, it was first performed at a Washington memorial service a year after the assassination.\u00a0Exquisite words by Helen Waddell, based on the fifth-century Prudentius, are evoked and vivified in music no less exquisite.<\/p>\n

More standard English cathedral repertory was represented by richly voiced motets by Tudor-period composers John Taverner, Thomas Tallis and Richard Dering. Rounding out the English fare were William Henry Harris\u2019 1925 \u201cFaire is the heaven,\u201d a double-choir evocation of heavenly bliss, to words by Edmund Spenser, and Gustav Holst\u2019s renaissance-influenced 1915 \u201cNunc dimittis.\u201d<\/p>\n

As customary in original performances, if rarely today, the early English works and Bach\u2019s motet \u201cKomm, Jesu, komm\u201d were accompanied, with organ scholar Thomas Simpson discreetly playing a small chamber organ. On the church\u2019s substantial\u00a0Noack organ, Simpson\u00a0performed solo pieces by William\u00a0Byrd and Dietrich Buxtehude, and three of Joanna Marsh\u2019s pleasantly quirky Four Musical Clocks, from 2009.<\/p>\n

Apart from key relationships, connections between wildly different pieces performed without pause were anything but obvious. And while the choir securely negotiated formidable harmonic challenges, some of the singing was louder than necessary for this repertory and a church that\u2019s not that large. Like orchestras, choirs seem to be getting louder these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Starting in the 1960s, recordings, broadcasts and tours by English cathedral and collegiate choirs came as a revelation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443105,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103,95191,93542,87998],"class_list":["post-443104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-tp-classical-music","tag-tp-performing-arts","tag-tp-dallas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}