Ely Consort – Music Always Round Me

For this concert in St Mary’s Church, Ely we are joined once again by the Euston String Quartet to perform a programme of wonderful choral music on the eve of the feast day of St Cecilia, the patron saint of music.

Three great works from the late romantic era – Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens, Stanford’s Ye Choirs of New Jerusalem and Dvořák’s Psalm 149 – will be performed in new arrangements for choir, string quartet and piano, and we will mark the occasion of Josef Rheinberger’s 125th anniversary by singing two movements from his unaccompanied Mass in E flat for double choir, alongside his beautiful setting of Abendlied.

The programme also features Ola Gjeilo’s incredibly powerful Dark and Luminous Night, and Alan Bullard’s Endless Song, a setting of poems for choir and string quartet which praise the joy of singing, including Walt Whitman’s ‘Music always round me’, the theme of our concert.