| About the Occam Singers
The Occam Singers choir deliberately avoids musical specialisation and we are pleased to sing from a wide repertoire, including unaccompanied fifteenth century church music and madrigals, familiar choral works and twenty-first century pieces. Our annual season includes full-scale concerts of choral music with a professional orchestra (the New London Sinfonia) as well as smaller-scale performances, sometimes a capella. Examples of works we have performed:
Mozart: Requiem
Purcell: Ode to St Cecilia and Funeral Sentences
Jenkins: The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace
Finzi: Seven Poems of Robert Bridges
Howells: Requiem
We rehearse in Guildford and concerts are held in Guildford and Godalming. We have also performed in a range of venues and events in Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire and we have sung services at some wonderful cathedrals. Singers have a wide range of musical backgrounds and ‘day jobs’ and a hallmark of our choir is the importance placed on friendship and fun. We employ a professional music director and associate musical director and undertake regular vocal training workshops engaging the services of professional vocal trainers.
We benefit local and national charities with our concerts; since 1982 the Occam Singers have donated over £90,000.
Promoting concerts is an expensive business! Much of the the Occam Singers’ fundraising success reflects the generosity of our sponsors, of our very supportive Friends, and of course of our concert audiences. The choir also raises income by singing at weddings and other events, which helps us to give generously to our charities.
The Occam Singers can be booked to sing for your special occasion: weddings, civil ceremonies, funerals and corporate functions.
Would you like to join the Occam Singers? We are always pleased to welcome new members especially tenors! To find out more, click the 'Join' link at the top of this page.
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Patron's Message.
For thirteen years it has been my joy and privilege to be Patron of The Occam Singers. I attend most concerts and depart delighted that I have been present. Both David Gibson and Nick O'Neill extract high standards of singing from the choir and the sound they provide is unique. Not only do they strive for perfection but their repertoire is, while mainly Baroque, quite eclectic and everyone is challenged by the discovery of unusual or seldom-performed works.
The camaraderie between the choir members has always been a feature. Not only do they get along well socially and the fact that they relish their singing and do it for charity (with all the behind the scenes tasks being done voluntarily by members) means that a spirit of benevolence prevails. May it continue with full heart and voices!
Lady Lingfield.
Occams sing works by short-lived composers
Holy Trinity Church June 25:
The Occam Singers' versatile Associate Music Director Nicholas O'Neill presented in Holy Trinity Church a fascinating programme of music by Schubert, Purcell, Humfrey, and John Blow, the only composer in the evening's programmes to have survived beyond his thirties.
O'Neill asked how the course of musical history might have changed had the others lived and composed to a good old age.
The programme began with an assured performance of Schubert's Mass in G, written when he was eighteen. This is a work full of confidence, with a backward glance to Beethoven and containing a Credo of tremendous fervour, as well as some solo movements capably performed by soloists drawn from the choir.
A later setting in German of the twenty-third psalm found the ladies of the forty-strong choir in tremendous form, and they were sensitively accompanied on the piano by Matthew Fletcher. Strings from the New London Sinfonia, who had provided the mellifluous accompaniment in the Schubert Mass, also performed Purcell's Chacony in G minor with a wonderful sense of the rise and fall of the music.
The second half of the concert, presented in aid of the Samson centre for sufferers from multiple sclerosis, was framed by Purcell anthems, ending with the lively Bell Anthem, a wonderful setting of words from St Paul's Epistle to the Philippians in which soloists, choir, and instrumentalists gave of their best. O God, thou art my God was likewise full of quirky turns of phrase and harmony, before ending with an Alleluia set to a gloriously familiar hymn tune. The voluntary for a ‘double organ’ (an organ with two manuals) proved to be full of trills and bold progressions, and received a fine performance from Matthew Fletcher.
In his thorough and entertaining introductions Nicholas O'Neill explained that Blow's Salvator Mundi with its Latin words was probably written for King Charles's Portuguese queen. And what a great piece it was, worthy of further performance.
But, notwithstanding Samuel Pepys's negative opinion of the young Pelham Humfrey, he could write some great music, and his setting of Psalm 22 was indeed a marvel, and received a wonderful performance.
Shelagh Godwin
Surrey Advertiser |
