Portsmouth Baroque Choir mark anniversary at Festival of Chichester

SussexWorld

Portsmouth Baroque Choir return to the Festival of Chichester to present a concert of music by Orlando Gibbons and his contemporaries to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his death.

Transcript

00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers and also Festival

00:07Chairman, Festival of Chichester Chairman. Now lovely that we have got back at this year's 2025

00:12Festival of Chichester, the Portsmouth Bilrock Choir. Now you are performing on Saturday July

00:18the 5th in Christchurch and you're celebrating a really significant anniversary this year,

00:24aren't you, the 400th anniversary of the death of Gibbons? That's correct and the concert falls

00:30exactly a month after the 400th anniversary. So why is he a composer we need to remember

00:39to celebrate now? He's a very celebrated English Renaissance composer, so slightly younger than

00:48Bird and Talies, but equally worthy of listening. He's very melodious, the music is very well put

00:58together, very well crafted. We don't have quite as much of his music as we do at Bird and Talies,

01:07but it's nearly all worth listening to and I would say actually, especially the Armens.

01:13One of the Armens from one of the pieces we're not actually singing this time,

01:18was used as the fire lament at the coronation of King George.

01:23Right, fantastic. And you were saying you do, you're admitting to a weakness for anniversaries,

01:30they're fantastic ways of celebrating and remembering, aren't they? A good sort of spur to

01:34reflect and remember. They are and it gives you a chart, it helps you with the concert programming if

01:39you've got one coming up, definitely. And you do enjoy playing in Chichester, you've done probably three

01:46festivals of Chichester and the lovely thing is for us in Chichester. You say you get a better

01:52audience in Chichester than you do back home in Bortsmouth, why is that?

01:55Well, I think it's just the people of Chichester supports it more. We also have the benefit of the

02:05festival's publicity, of course, which helps. The cathedral, it wasn't that long ago, the cathedral

02:14put on a lunchtime concert with the Rose consort of one or two of these pieces. In fact, we're only

02:23playing two of the pieces that they performed. So there's not a great deal of crossover. So people

02:31who've come there and enjoyed it might like to come to this concert and hear some more givens.

02:36Fantastic. Well, Malcolm, it's lovely that the choir is back at the Festival of Chichester,

02:41even lovelier to hear that you get better audiences in Chichester than you do in Bortsmouth,

02:45which does of course mean you will just have to keep on coming to the Festival of Chichester.

02:50Hope you have a great time at St Paul's and lovely to speak to you. Thank you very much.

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