The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, will sing in Berkeley.
Each year on Christmas Eve, millions of listeners worldwide tune their radios to a live broadcast from the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, to hear the boys and men of the choir sing holiday music. It’s part of a historical lineage that extends back to 1441, when Henry VI created the choir to provide music for daily worship services in his private chapel.
But the sounds of these young musicians — perhaps as pure an example as one can find of the long English tradition of choral singing — are available elsewhere than through the airwaves. This week, the choir and its longtime director Stephen Cleobury visit UC Berkeley with a program of choral music drawn from several centuries’ worth of music. The concert is part of Cal Performances’ season-long string of presentations celebrating the human voice, a series that includes choral and solo vocal events.
Cleobury, 68, spoke by phone recently from the U.K. Q: You’ve got two somewhat disparate groups of singers combined in this operation — the boys of the King’s College Choir, and the older undergraduates from the college itself. Is it a challenge for you to meld those two ensembles into one? A: I wouldn’t say it’s a challenge, but there is an interesting duality in the way I work with them. Each group has its own individual dynamic, and then when we bring them together there’s still another dynamic that has to be formed. Q: When you’re not on tour, the choir sings for the daily worship services. What is the nature of those services? What sort of congregation does it serve? A: That’s a pertinent question. First and foremost, this is a private college chapel, and it exists to serve the college community — where until the 19th century, of course, chapel attendance was compulsory.
But we also choose to open it to the public. That includes residents of Cambridge, people from other colleges within the university, and members of the public — visitors, tourists, call them what you will. So it’s quite a mixed congregation, and very different from what you’d find in a parish church. Q: When you tour, do you present something in the nature of a concert experience, or is it more or less a simulation of what a visitor would hear in the chapel itself ? A: That varies according to the program. For example, last summer at the Royal Albert Hall, we performed a Haydn Mass and the Fauré Requiem — which are certainly not anything we would ordinarily do for Evensong.
But for this tour, the request was that we present exactly what you’d hear in the chapel. So I’ve assembled a selection of things that we do in the normal course of events, but put together in what I hope is a reasonably structured way. Q: What does that entail? A: Well, the program is structured in four groups from different parts of the repertoire. We begin with music from the 16th century, then go on to a group of pieces by 20th century French composers — Messiaen, Poulenc and so on.
After that we go all the way back to the Renaissance, and we finish up with a selection of 19th and early 20th century music. Q: You’ve directed the choir since 1982, and its history goes back many centuries. I imagine you must be mindful of that long tradition, as well as the general tradition of English church singing. A: Exactly so. There’s a sort of paradox about the fact that in the U.K., churchgoing has declined sharply, while at the same time, there’s a rising interest in the musical life of cathedrals and choral foundations. Aside from religion, this business of singing and artistic expression has a value of its own that people are recognizing. Q: What does that mean for you personally? A: For me to have the stewardship of this institution is both a great privilege and a large responsibility, and it requires me to find the right equilibrium between continuity and change. I’ve sought to introduce new repertoire into the choir’s daily life, but also to take account of the performance practice of earlier periods.
The goal is for us to offer as wide a range of repertoire as we can — to do everything from Gregorian chant to contemporary music.