Soundbites
A Frideswide open door
For the first time in its 473-year history, Christ Church, Oxford is to have a permanent girls’ choir. From next term, Frideswide Voices, which has previously only enjoyed occasional residencies in the college chapel, will sing one evensong a week, thus sharing duties with the longestablished boys’ choir. The girls’ choir will also change its official name to Frideswide Voices of Christ Church, Oxford.
Every Finn changes
Things are on the move in Helsinki. Or, more precisely, conductors are. In Autumn 2021, Nicholas Collon (see Music That Changed Me, p122) will become chief conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the first non-finn to hold the post. He replaces Hannu Lintu, who from January 2022 takes over as chief conductor of Finnish National Opera and Ballet.
Phoenix heights
In Arizona, meanwhile, the Phoenix Chorale has announced that Christopher Gabbitas is to be its new artistic director. A former choral scholar at St John’s College, Cambridge, Gabbitas has become familiar to choral fans worldwide as a member of the King’s Singers, for whom he sang second baritone from 2004 until the end of 2018, the group’s golden anniversary year. He will conduct his first concerts with his new ensemble this autumn.
Pass the polonium
The infamous death of Alexander Litvinenko is set to be dramatised in a new opera in 2020. Fourteen years after the former Russian secret service agent was poisoned by a cup of tea containing polonium-210, audiences at Grange Park Opera in Surrey will see and hear him portrayed on stage by tenor Adrian Dwyer in a specially commissioned work by composer Anthony Bolton and libtrettist Kit Hesketh Harvey. See Richard Morrison, p25.