2025 Concert Series
Southern Voices are thrilled to be back into rehearsal after such a wonderful 40th celebratory year, and hoping to continue on, hot on the heels of all that was achieved last calendar year as part of our special milestone. With so many collaborations involved, with new reaches and strives from our wider committee and with a real thirst for excellence, 2025 promises to be another exciting year.
Over the course of this year, Southern Voices can be heard in varying locations – Holy Trinity, Winchester in March, St. John’s Alresford in the Summer, our ‘home’ of St. Paul’s in November and our usual residency at St. Cross at Christmas. With each venue comes a new challenge and this season’s music has very much been chosen with this in mind. Firstly, to March, and this new concert venue offers real spatial possibilities. Hence, the choice of Frank Martin’s mighty Mass for Double Choir and Eric Whitacre’s Three Songs of Faith will provide atmospheric yet exciting approaches to this expansive style of composition. Singing in 8-parts and more for the majority of this repertoire provides new textural and contrapuntal possibilities, showing the capabilities of the ensemble. The second anthem in Whitacre’s set, “Hope, Faith, Life, Love”, headlines Southern Voices’ season, with repertoire chosen across the year to suit these most poignant and relatable humanistic and real themes of faith and understanding, the four pillars, perhaps, of human existence.
As the journey from darkness to light, Lent to Easter and onto the summer months is made, Southern Voices head to Alresford where we will perform Bob Chilcott’s lesser-known Canticles of Light. This fascinating composition sets three very well-known texts but in a quite unexpected way, making use of instruments, solo lines, varying musical textures and styles, but all with a continual forward-looking approach. To accompany, seasonal works of a lighter variety will also feature in the concert.
November and December are such magical months in the calendar for so many different reasons. From a choral perspective, this is always an opportunity to mix the old and the new, a true depiction of hope and faith through life and love. Both Remembrance and Christmas are such poignant times of the year, it is important that music is performed to match the sentiment. With this in mind, Southern Voices will present Ian Venables’ glorious Requiem in the Autumn. Becoming more widely known and staple in the repertoire (and rightly so), this is a setting of a familiar text that has influences from a very English tradition but with undoubted colours of French and German choral tapestry woven into the music. Its drama and sound world make for a perfect accompaniment in the form of Hubert Parry’s Songs of Farewell, themselves such feats of composition and excellence. This concert will be a very special occasion for sure, an ideal lead into the eventual joys and smiles of ‘Christmas with Southern Voices’, once more in the fabulous surroundings of St. Cross with some real treats to look forward to. As ever, do follow us in all the usual places and check online for details of tickets, times and venues. Thank you for all your support and we look forward to welcoming you to our concerts this season.
-- Jamal
