Our choir members voted on the charity to support at our Christmas concert 2024. The chosen charity was The Lighthouse Centre, Northampton.
The Lighthouse Centre are a local charity offering palliative care and support to those facing the challenges of a daunting diagnosis.
From their website:
‘When pain and tiredness make your days seem hard to manage When fear and anxiety are holding you back When a life on medication seems almost inevitable Let The Lighthouse Centre Show You a New Path‘
The Lighthouse Centre’s aim is is to provide palliative care to patients with long term medical conditions or cancers to support their quality of life during a time of vulnerability.
We are pleased to support this very worth cause and last night we presented our donation of £1,000 from the proceeds of our recent concerts to Gemma and her colleague from The Lighthouse Centre.
EBM Committee Member Esther and Musical Director Jon present donation to Gemma and colleague from The Lighthouse Centre
Our final concert of the Christmas Season was on Saturday 7th December 2024 at Christchurch, Northampton with the Northampton Concert Band, conducted by Graham Tear.
The band started off the concert with “A Festival Fanfare” with lots of easily identifiable Christmas tunes to spot.
We had been invited to join the band for some Christmas carols and some of our own pieces, so we started at the end of the band’s piece called “A Winter’s Night”. This was a beautiful evocative wintery piece, which ended with a soft and peaceful verse of “Silent Night” which the choir sang.
Then we performed “Child in a Manger” by John Rutter. We were accompanied by the wonderful concert band. At first glance you may think that you don’t know this piece, but once the melody starts you realise very quickly that it is “Morning has Broken”!
We performed “Ubi Caritas” by Ola Gjeilo, which gives a nod to Gregorian Chant and church music of long ago as it is sung in Latin, but with a modern feel with piano improvisations performed brilliantly by our very own accompanist, Richard Holloway. This was very atmospheric in the beautiful acoustics of the church.
The band then played an excellent piece called “Minor Alterations” where lots of Christmas melodies were transformed by changing them into a minor key, rather than their usual major version. This gave some of the tunes a dark and sinister feel and was very entertaining.
Then back to another John Rutter piece “Christmas Night” accompanied by the gentle sound of the concert band clarinet section. This was guaranteed to ensure that any babies in the audience were sleeping soundly! The choir sang in melting 4-part harmonies and all was calm and bright.
The first half ended with the Concert Band’s performance of an arrangement of the film music for “ET the extra-terrestrial.” This had us all sitting on the edge of our seats absorbed in the music. A few tissues were needed for the ending!
After the interval the concert band started off with an arrangement of Jingle Bells, using the percussion section to great effect, followed by “Hark the Herald” with audience participation.
Next, the choir sang “The Shepherd’s Pipe Carol” with lovely bouncy rhythms and syncopated sections. Such a feel-good carol!
The Concert Band played 2 more pieces: “ Let the Bells Ring” and “New York” which showed the skill and dexterity of all the amazing players.
Then the gloves came off and we all played and sang “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. When we got to the section of “5 Gold Rings” the audience, band and choir nearly blew the church roof off!!
Finally, the band finished the concert with “A Christmas Overture” and “The Christmas Song”, all feel good pieces which left everyone with a big smile on their faces. It was very enjoyable and entertaining concert and a great start to the Christmas Season.
Written by Anne-Marie Blackadder, Alto
The members of Earls Barton Music who formed the choir for the Concert Band Christmas Spectacular.
We recently performed our annual Christmas concert at St Barnabas Church in Wellingborough over two consecutive evenings, raising funds for The Lighthouse Centre. This year, our seasonal programme “A Choral Christmas” featured music from a range of genres and time periods, and we were accompanied by a wonderful orchestra.
As with any good Christmas concert, the evening began with obligatory audience participation in the singing of the traditional Christmas carol “O, Little Town of Bethlehem”, before the choir performed the first of our Baroque pieces, Schütz’s cantata “The Christmas Story”. This was an extended piece made up of several short movements, and featured a number of solo and small group ensemble pieces, as well as three lively movements sung by the whole choir. The first half then ended with two modern carols; “Child in a Manger” and “Christmas Night” composed by the ever-popular John Rutter, and a performance of the well-loved carol “In the Bleak Midwinter”.
The choir began the second half of the concert with a performance of the hauntingly beautiful “Ubi Caritas”, an arrangement of a fourth century Latin chant composed in 2001 by Ola Gjeilo, which also featured a stunning version of Gjeilo’s original piano improvisation performed by our talented accompanist Richard Holloway. Next on the programme was the second of our Baroque pieces, Bach’s cantata “Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben” (“Heart and mouth and deed and life”) which we sang in German. In similar fashion to the Schütz performed earlier, this was a longer work composed of solo and whole choir elements, held together by recitatives (sung narratives) performed by Wyn Jones. The concert then closed with “O Come All Ye Faithful”, once again with the assistance of the audience.
As always, we could not have achieved such a successful sequence of concerts without the support and guidance of our musical director Jon Rees, and our co-director Helen Taylor, who kept us going with their encouragement and unfailing good humour (especially when the Bach tied our tongues in knots on a regular basis!).
Earls Barton Music 