Come and listen to Birmingham Festival Choral Society sing choral music with a Jazz and Blues theme! Gorgeous harmonies and toe-tapping rhythms.
We will be singing with a jazz trio consisting of Kevin Gill on piano, Andy Derrick on double bass and Julian Powell on drums.
See our Concerts page for the full programme.
Drinks will be served at the Ruddock Performing Arts Centre from 7pm. The concert starts at 7.30pm.
Our Passion Music concert on 26th March was a night to remember. Singing with the rhythmic backing of a jazz ensemble and the gorgeous jazz vocalist was a wonderful experience. All those weeks of preparation, and the inspiring workshop with the composer Will Todd came together to produce an evening of glorious choral jazz and blues.
Piano – Kevin Gill, Double bass – Mike Green, Drums – Julian Powell, Saxophone – Andy Isherwood, Soprano – Hannah Davey.
Passion Music, written by Will Todd in 2018, is an extremely moving telling of the Easter story of Christ’s passion through English texts set to jazz and blues. We also loved singing Mass in Blue once again.
The choir wore blue and yellow ribbons to mark the tragic situation in Ukraine. At the beginning of the second half the choir sang A Prayer for Ukraine, and a retiring collection for the Disasters Emergency Committee Ukraine Relief Fund raised £620.
Thank you to talented photographer Kyle Simms for this great collection of photographs from the concert.
Will Todd’s Mass in Blue and Passion Music are very different from our usual repertoire, but we’re really loving those jazz rhythms and blues harmonies! Listen to our singers and Music Director talking about the Will Todd music we’re learning for the concert at the Ruddock Performing Arts Centre on 26th March.
We’re delighted that Will Todd is coming to our choir workshop on Sunday. We’ll be rehearsing ‘Passion Music’ and ‘Mass in Blue’ , and it will be a real treat to hear insights from the composer of these wonderful pieces. They are challenging to learn, but it’s so rewarding to sing those complex rhythms and gorgeous blues harmonies.
In this 25 minute video, Will Todd gives us an insight into choosing the words for ‘Passion music’ and setting them to music. His fusion of choral, jazz and blues styles brings out the meaning of the story of Christ’s passion with spiritual sensitivity.
Rehearsals are well under way for a wonderful concert of Will Todd’s choral jazz music on Saturday 26th March.
Those who came to the Birmingham Festival Choral Society concert in July 2018 will remember the excitement of Mass in Blue, with its blend of energetic rhythmic jazz movements and gorgeous slow reflective pieces. Hannah Davey, our soprano soloist was the star of the show, and we’re delighted that she is able to sing with us again.
Passion Music was premiered in 2018 . Will Todd uses the same fusion of sacred choral music and jazz idoms to highlight different events in the Christian Passion story with spiritual sensitivity. The choir and soloist will be accompanied by a jazz ensemble consisting of piano, drums, double bass and saxophone.
PASSION MUSIC
Will Todd: Mass in Blue
Will Todd: Passion Music
Birmingham Festival Choral Society, conductor David Wynne,
Saturday 26th March 7.30pm
The Ruddock Performing Arts Centre, King Edward’s School,
Edgbaston Park Road, Birmingham, B15 2UA.
Trefoil House was full for our ‘Choral Jazz and Blues’ concert on a hot night in July. Our guests relaxed at tables, sipping their drinks and eating their snacks as they listened to a style of choral music that was very different to the usual BFCS repertoire.
It was a treat for the singers to be accompanied by such skilful Jazz musicians. Chris Corcoran on piano, Dave Wilkes on drums and Mike Green on upright bass gave us a rhythmic accompaniment that really boosted our singing!
The first half of the programme consisted of George Shearing’s ‘Songs and Sonnets from Shakespeare’, and the ‘Birthday Madrigals’ that John Rutter wrote for Shearing’s 75th birthday. Both works fuse traditional choral music with American Jazz influences. The Jazz Trio then entertained us, while people refilled their glasses or stepped outside to cool down.
The highlight of the evening came after the interval. ‘Mass in Blue’, Will Todd’s popular setting of the Latin Mass, combines his background in sacred choral music with his love of jazz. Although the style had seemed unfamiliar at the beginning of term, the BFCS singers had soon come to love the beauty of the Kyrie and Sanctus, the fun of the Benedictus, and the excitement of the Credo and Agnus Dei! Our soprano soloist Hannah Davey was just awesome, effortlessly moving between the loudest sections, with top Cs, and the spine-tingling beauty of the ‘Et incarnatus est’.
What a lovely surprise to find out that the concert had been recorded from the audience! Thank you to Alex Botten for sending this to us:
This concert was very popular with both singers and audience, and we hope to explore some other choral jazz works in the future. Watch this space!
Many thanks to David Jones and Mandy Hart for taking these pictures from the audience.
We have an exciting line up of professional jazz musicians for our performance of Will Todd’s Mass in Blue on Saturday 14th July!
Hannah Davey, sings the soprano solo, which is a major part of the work and has great moments of interplay with the choir. Hannah has the rare talent of being equally at home singing classical and jazz music. As well as professional singing, Hannah works with the charity ‘Music for Autism’which provides high calibre performance for children and adults with special needs.
Our Jazz Trio consists of Chris Corcoran, piano, Mike Green on upright bass and Dave Wilkes on drums.
Chris is well known in the Birmingham area as a director or accompanist for musical theatre. He enjoys arranging and composing jazz music, and has played and toured with many bands.
Mike’s experience varies from small intimate Jazz Clubs to appearing on national TV. In recent years he has been touring and recording with Gypsy jazz guitarist Remi Harris.
Dave was playing in the junior section of the Midlands Jazz Orchestra as young as 6 years of age! In more recent years he’s played with many bands on tour, and in theatre for shows such as ‘Legally Blonde’ and ‘Back to the 80s’ in Birmingham.
We can’t wait to perform ‘Mass in Blue’ with such exciting musicians!
CHORAL JAZZ & BLUES
If you regularly attend performances by the Birmingham Festival Choral Society (which we sincerely hope you do!) you will find next month’s event something of a contrast. All of the works are British, contemporary, in the jazz idiom – and, by all accounts, highly popular with audiences. The concert is called CHORAL JAZZ & BLUES: the lighter side of choral music. Moreover, it will take place not at our normal church or concert hall venues but in the Informal setting of Trefoil House in central Birmingham, with food and drink at your table while you soak up the music.
What of the music itself? The main item, Mass in Blue, written by Will Todd, is a remarkable fusion of two very different musical traditions: the sung Mass (whose European origins date from medieval times) and the Blues (of African-American 19th century origin, a forerunner of jazz). This reflects the Durham-born composer’s “double life”, on the one hand an experienced chorister and classically-trained pianist, and on the other a jazz musician in his ‘down time’.
The work, accompanied by a small jazz ensemble (piano, upright bass, drums – and a virtuoso soprano soloist) features the traditional sections of the sung Catholic Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, Angus Dei). For those familiar to conventional Mass settings, there will be much to recognise: plainchants and Latin rhythms interwoven with Blues-style syncopation, improvisation and melodies. First performed in 2003, Mass in Blue was an immediate success, and is an increasingly popular item of the choral repertoire.
Two further works in the jazz idiom feature in the programme. Songs and Sonnets is a cycle of seven familiar Shakespeare verses (including It was a lover and his lass and Who is Sylvia?) by the revered British jazz pianist and composer Sir George Shearing, who died in 2011. The concert will also include Birthday Madrigals by the popular choral composer John Rutter, who was commissioned to write this collection of songs on the occasion of Shearing’s 75th birthday.
CHORAL JAZZ & BLUES, with the Birmingham Festival Choral Society conducted by Kevin Gill, takes place at Trefoil House, Blucher Street B1 1QL, on Saturday 14 July at 6.30pm. You are welcome to bring some supper to enjoy at your own table. There will be a bar available from the start of the concert for wine and soft drinks.
