Who are the William Byrd Singers?
The William Byrd Singers are one of the foremost chamber choirs in the North West, and were founded just over fifty years ago in 1970 by our first conductor, the great Stephen Wilkinson MBE. Stephen sadly passed away at the beginning of August 2021, but his musical baton had already been passed. Keith Orrell, a former Byrd, has been Music Director since 2009, and his tenure has seen the choir tackle repertoire as varied as Howells's Requiem, Hindemith's Apparebit Repentina Dies, Byrd's Mass à 4 from partbooks, and Roderick Williams's reimagining of Byrd's Ave Verum Corpus.
Standards remain high, and our rehearsal venue being also our main concert venue helps a great deal with pre-concert nerves! By the time a concert arrives, of course, our stalwart committee have dotted all possible i's and crossed every t in sight. We could not imagine concert preparation without Chair Rosemary's exhortations to carry our folders correctly!
Concerts and more
But concert giving is not our only focus! We host an annual Come-And-Sing event, Sing Joyfully! It is a day-long workshop on a single large-scale work either from the Renaissance or closely connected to it. We explore the music, sometimes breaking into sectionals, and come together for a final performance, leaving heavenly strains echoing in our ears as we say farewell for another year. In recent years we have tackled Tallis's monumental Spem In Alium; investigated the connections between Palestrina's Missa Assumpta est Maria and Pizzetti's De Profundis; and been joined by members of The Sixteen to get under the skin of Byrd's Mass à 5.. In 2024 we look to Domenico Scarlatti to provide us with material, and his Stabat Mater à 10, plus a part for basso continuo, is sure to keep us on our toes through the day as we navigate its darker passages.
New music
Ildebrando Pizzetti, a 20th Century Italian composer, might seem unusual company for Scarlatti, Palestrina and the like; but this merely serves to highlight another strand that has run through the Byrds since we were founded. We don't just look backwards to the musical masterpieces of our namesake and his contemporaries. We also actively promote recent and new works, including commissioning significant composers to create music for us. Composers we have commissioned include Elizabeth Maconchy, and we are proud tohold the largest collection of original choral works and arrangements by our founder, Stephen Wilkinson MBE, which we seek to programme and promote as often as we can. And one recent concert was of music entirely by living composers.
Enjoying variety
It seems clear that in order to continue to appeal to current audiences of — and to create new audiences for — choral music, we cannot limit ourselves to any period or style. We will continue to champion the work of the masters of choral polyphony from the 15th and 16th centuries -- we could not do otherwise, given our name, and recently celebrated the joint 400th anniversaries of the births of our namesake William Byrd and his contemporary Thomas Weelkes, joining forces with the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble to recreate the sound world of Byrd's Great Service, alongside anthems and pavans by both composers.
But we shall also entice new listeners to discover the masterpieces that were written more recently, even in our lifetimes and this current century, which has seen something of a renaissance of choral writing itself, with marvellous works such as Eric Whitacre's Sleep and the stunning simplicity of Ola Gjielo, whose works The Spheres (the 'Kyrie' from his Sunrise Mass) and Ubi Caritas have featured in recent concert programmes. We hope that we might thereby weave the threads of choral music's history into a unified tapestry of art.
