Past Concerts

Below is a selection of past concert programmes from the last few years, to give you a flavour of the variety of music performed by the Cantilena Singers.

22 July 2023: Celebrate!

A special concert to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Cantilena Singers, the choir performed at the church in its home village, St. Mary’s, Swaffham Bulbeck, with a special programme of secular part songs and folk song arrangements by English composers.

  • Elmer – Six partsongs on poems by Christina Rossetti
  • Britten – Selections from Five Flower Songs
  • Finzi – Selections from Seven partsongs on poems by Robert Bridges
  • Rutter – Selections from Five Traditional Songs and Five Childhood Lyrics
  • Wood – Nights of music and Come, sleep
  • Ross – The wild mountain thyme
  • Finn – She moved through the fair

Founding director, Roger Bond, was in attendance, along with a number of former members of the choir, who joined the current members on stage to perform The wile mountain thyme together.

Download the concert programme

18 March 2023: Salvator mundi

The Cantilena Singers returned to St. Mary’s, Swaffham Prior, for a Lenten concert featuring music from the 16th century to the present day.

  • Stopford – Three Sacred Miniatures
  • Rheinberger – Kyrie and Agnus Dei from Mass in E flat major, Op. 109
  • Palestrina – Sicut cervus
  • Victoria – Jesu dulcis memoria
  • Tallis – If ye love me, In manus tuas and Salvator mundi

Download the concert programme

10 December 2022: O magnum mysterium

Returning to St. Nicholas’s Church, Great Wilbraham, the Cantilena Singers performed a programme built around different composers’ responses to the responsorial chant for the Matins on Christmas Day, “O magnum mysterium”, including the famous setting by Morten Lauridsen, and the complete mass by Tomás Luis de Victoria.

  • Victoria – Missa “O magnum mysterium”
  • Lauridsen – O magnum mysterium
  • Whitacre – Lux aurumque
  • Britten – A hymn to the Virgin
  • Villette – Hymne à la Vierge
  • Darke – In the bleak midwinter
  • Howells – Long, long ago

Download the concert programme