Autumn Concert 2019

With four professional soloists, we are delighted to be performing Handel’s setting of a libretto based on John Dryden’s ode, Alexander’s Feast or The Power of Love.

Composed in 1736 and premiered at Covent Garden Theatre, London, this magnificent piece describes a banquet held by Alexander the Great in the captured Persian city of Persepolis.  Encouraged by his mistress, Thais, and the singing of the Greek army’s resident musician, Timotheus, an increasingly intoxicated Alexander and his guests set about burning down the city in order to avenge the Greek soldiers killed in battle with the Persians.

The success of this work encouraged Handel to make the transition from writing Italian opera to English choral works.

Royal Free Singers: Magnificat - an evening of music by Bach

Bach Magnificat and Advent Cantatas

Saturday, 1st December  7.30

Windsor Parish Church

The Royal Free Singers, under the direction of their conductor, Ben Gunner, and accompanied on the organ by Luke Bond, Assistant Director of Music of Saint George's Chapel, Windsor castle, are performing three Bach masterpieces associated with the Advent and Christmas season: the cantatas Nun komm der heiden Heiland (Come now, Saviour of the heathens) BWV61 (1714) and Wachetauf ruf uns die Stimme (Sleepers Awake) BWV140 (1731), and the joyous Magnificat BWV243, first performed on Christmas Day in Leipzig in 1733. Luke Bond will also be playing organ works.


Ticket prices:
£15
£1 for under 12s,
£5 for 12-16 year-olds
Special block booking rates for 10+ tickets, if booked in advance.

For tickets:- 
click here to buy tickets

Phone: 07434 626045
Email: linchanan@aol.com 
Call in: The Royal Windsor Information Centre, Royal Windsor Station, Windsor

Spring Concert 2018 - Durufle and Peeters

 

Durufle - Requiem

Flor Peeters - Missa Festiva

Windsor Parish Church:  Saturday, 24 March 2018, 7.30 pm

Flor Peeters (1903-1986) was a professor at the celebrated Lemmens Institute music school in Leuven, and for the greater part of his life was organist at Belgium’s metropolitan cathedral, St. Rombout’s in Mechelen (pictured). Other posts held included organ and composition professorships at Tilburg and Antwerp Conservatories. Renaissance music, particularly the school of Flemish polyphony, was a significant influence on his own compositions, including the Missa Festiva, composed in 1947, perhaps the best known of his nine Masses.
 
Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) composed his 1947 Requiem, opus 9, in memory of his father. Like Fauré he omits the Dies Irae and employs a mezzo-soprano and baritone soloist for, respectively, the Pie Jesu and sections of the Offertorium and Libera me. The music while based on themes from the Gregorian plainchant Mass for the Dead, has a distinctly contemporary, but individual character. Many consider it to be one of the most beautiful pieces of 20th century religious music.

Ticket prices:
£15
£1 for under 12s,
£5 for 12-16 year-olds
Special block booking rates for 10+ tickets, if booked in advance.

For tickets:- 
click here to buy tickets

Phone: 07434 626045
Email: linchanan@aol.com 
Call in: The Royal Windsor Information Centre, Royal Windsor Station, Windsor

Willcocks, Beethoven and Mozart

Winter Concert 2017

Windsor Parish Church

Saturday 2 December, 2017

The Royal Free Singers have commissioned a new work with orchestral accompaniment from their patron, the composer Jonathan Willcocks, which will be premiered at this concert. Titled The Song of Mary, it incorporates a variety of Marian texts from different times and sources, including a new setting of the Magnificat.

Each year Prince Nikolaus Esterházy used to commission a new Mass to celebrate his wife’s name day, a function performed for many years by Joseph Haydn until his retirement on ill-health grounds in 1802.

Beethoven's Mass in C was commissioned in an attempt to continue this tradition. Completed in 1807, it includes some of the ideas he was to use nearly two decades later in his 9th Symphony, the Choral.

The concert includes Mozart's Symphony No 35 in D Majoy, K385, composed in 1782 to a commission from the prominent Salzburg Haffner family.

Ticket prices:
£15
£1 for under 12s,
£5 for 12-16 year-olds
Special block booking rates for 10+ tickets, if booked in advance.

For tickets:-

Click here for link to online booking
Phone: 07434 626045
Email: linchanan@aol.com 
Call in: The Royal Windsor Information Centre, Royal Windsor Station, Windsor

Summer Concert 2017

The Sprig of Thyme

The Sprig of Thyme, by John Rutter, is a suite of eleven familiar and not so familiar traditional British and Irish folk songs, many covering themes of love lost or found, or betrayal.  They include long-standing favourites as the Willow song and The Miller of Dee and lesser known gems as O can ye sew cushions and The Sprig of Thyme, a 17^th century song from Lincolnshire.

Stanford’s Songs of the Fleet is a setting of five nautical poems by the poet Henry Newbolt (1862-1938) who had a particular line in ardently patriotic nautical ballads (perhaps most famously ‘Drake’s Drum’, which Stanford had set in an earlier collection of sea songs, Songs of the Sea.)

Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs, are settings of poems by the 17^th century poet and priest George Herbert from his 1633 collection The Temple: Sacred Poems.  Though an agnostic, Vaughan Williams’ music beautifully complements the religious inspiration behind Herbert’s verses.

Ticket prices:
£12
£1 for under 12s,
£5 for 12-16 year-olds
Special block booking rates for 10+ tickets, if booked in advance.


For tickets:-

Phone: 07434 626045
Click here to buy tickets online
Call in: The Royal Windsor Information Centre, Royal Windsor Station, Windsor

Elgar: Spring Concert 2017

Royal Free Singers

April 8th: 7.30, Eton College School Hall

Having already performed his three great oratorios, The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles and The Kingdom, the Royal Free Singers’ next concert includes two of Elgar’s lesser known but equally memorable choral works.  The concert opens with an early work, the Serenade for Strings in E minor (opus 20), followed by The Spirit of England (opus 80), a setting of poems by Laurence Binyon, written following the outbreak of war in 1914.  Composed between 1915 and 1917, it is his finest wartime music and is both grand and melancholy.

The second half will be a performance of his romantic choral piece The Music Makers (opus 69).  It begins with the evocative lines “We are the Music Makers and we are the dreamers of dreams”.  The music is full of quotations from his earlier works including The Dream of Gerontius, Sea Pictures and The Enigma Variations.  It is like a mini autobiography, reflecting events and feelings from various periods of his life.  

Ticket prices:
£15
£1 for under 12s,
£5 for 12-16 year-olds
Special block booking rates for 10+ tickets, if booked in advance.



Please note there is no parking at Eton College. Those attending this event should note that parking is available in public car parks within the town of Eton and Windsor.

For tickets:-

Book tickets online (click here)
Phone: 07434 626045
Email: linchanan@aol.com 
Call in: The Royal Windsor Information Centre, Royal Windsor Station, Windsor

Come and Sing - Messiah

Come and sing Handel's Messiah!

Saturday, October 15th

Windsor Parish Church

Windsor Parish Church Organ Fund

Come and Sing Handel’s Messiah

Conducted by Ben Gunner

Accompanist John Chantrey – Piano

Parish Church of St John the Baptist, Windsor, SL41LR

Programme:

2.00:  Registration

2.30 – 4.30:  Rehearsal

4.30 – 5.30:   Tea and cake

5.30:  Informal concert family and friends welcome.

Retiring collection for the Windsor Parish Church Organ fund. 

Tickets: £15 (£5 for under 18s) to include refreshments and loan of score if required. 

Please send application and payment to

Helen Archibald, Secretary, Royal Free Singers, 37, Green Lane, Windsor, Berks, SL4 3RZ Tel:  01753 830944

Applications to be received by 1^st October 2016

Applications also invited from willing soloists!  If you would be interested, please return your application by 15^th September 2016

Summer Concert: Songs from Stage and Screen

'Into the Woods' and Opera Choruses

Saturday, June 25th

Windsor Parish Church: 7.30pm

The first half of the programme will feature opera choruses by the Royal Free Singers and items from G:Force’s core repertoire. The second half will include the choirs joining forces for a medley from the Stephen Sondheim musical "Into the Woods", conducted by Steve Cook, G:Force's Musical Director.

The Royal Free Singers are glad to welcome back to Windsor the G:Force Gospel Choir, the Formby Arts College Gospel Choir.  The choir’s repertoire consists of a broad variety of soul, gospel, R&B, pop and contemporary commissions.  

This will be our fourth shared concert: Alexander L’Estrange’s Zimbe! in June 2012 and the suite from Les Misérables in June 2014, both in Windsor, and a concert featuring Lin Marsh’s Winter Solstice, in Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral in November 2013.

Ticket prices:

£12
£1 for under 12s,
£5 for 12-16 year-olds
Special block booking rates for 10+ tickets, if booked in advance.
For tickets:-
Phone:  01628 638984
Email: lambourne2@talktalk.net
Order though our Contact Us page 
Call in: The Royal Windsor Information Centre, Royal Windsor Station, Windsor

 

 

Mozart Requiem

The Royal Free Singers

Spring Concert 2016

Like his penultimate Mass, the "Great" C minor Mass, Mozart never completed his last, the Requiem (K626).  Unlike the C minor Mass, however, it was written to a commission and in order to fulfil this and not risk forfeiting the fee, his widow Constanze asked Mozart’s pupil Süssmayr to complete it from the sketches Mozart had left of the unfinished movements. 

The other works in the concert are a performance by the Orchestra of London of Mozart’s last symphony, the Jupiter, composed in 1788 and the incomparable motet Ave Verum Corpus, Mozart’s last completed sacred work, composed in June 1791 only a few months before his death.

Saturday, March 19th, Windsor Parish Church 7.30 pm

Ticket prices:

• £15
• £1 for under 12s,
• £5 for 12-16 year-olds
• Special block booking rates - 10+ tickets 20% discount, if booked in advance.

For tickets:-

• Phone:  01628 638984
• Email: lambourne2@talktalk.net
• Order though our Contact Us page 
• Call in: The Royal Windsor Information Centre, Royal Windsor Station, Windso

The Royal Free Singers Summer concert 2015

Two masses: Jongen and Faure

The two works in this concert are both tuneful expositions of the Latin Mass: the well known and loved Fauré Requiem and the, until now, hardly known Mass Opus 130 by the Belgian composer Joseph Jongen (1873-1953), described by John W. Ehrlich, Music Director of the Spectrum Singers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, as "one of the most beautiful and accessible pieces of 20th century choral music I know."  Jongen composed it in July 1945 in thanksgiving for his son's release from Buchenwald earlier that year and dedicated it to his late brother, the Reverend Canon Alphonse Jongen of Liege Cathedral.  He added the Credo in 1948.  Nearly forgotten for the next 40 years, in recent years it has been performed with increasing frequency throughout the world.  

The background image shows the interior of Liege Cathedral, where the Jongen Mass was first performed.

Ticket prices:

• £12
• £1 for under 12s,
• £5 for 12-16 year-olds
• Special block booking rates for churches and other organisations -
  10+ tickets 20% discount, if booked in advance.

For tickets:-

• Phone:  01628 638984
• Email: lambourne2@talktalk.net
• Order though our Contact Us page 
• Call in: The Royal Windsor Information Centre, Royal Windsor Station, Windsor

Haydn: Die Jahreszeiten (The Seasons)

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) The Seasons

Both of Haydn's late oratorios are settings of texts based on English epic poetry: The Creation on John Milton's Paradise Lost and The Seasons on James Thomson’s epic poem of the same name, written in 1730.  It is a depiction of pre-industrial rural life that touches on love, friendship, hardship, success as well as harvest celebrations.  Using a German translation of sections of Thomson’s poem, Haydn began work on it in 1798, shortly after the well-received first performance of The Creation, and completed it in 1801.  Like The Creation, it calls for soprano, tenor, and bass soloists, chorus and a large orchestra including four horns and three trombones.  

RFS Autumn Concert 2014

The Armed Man 

and  

Requiem for the Living

The two works in this concert are both pleas for peace.  Donald Swann’s Requiem for the Living (1971) is a setting of C Day Lewis’s 1962 poem, which uses the structure, but not the text, of the Requiem Mass to make a vivid plea to abolish nuclear weapons and respect the beauty of the world, which a nuclear holocaust would destroy.

The Armed Man subtitled A Mass for Peace and dedicated to victims of the Kosovo crisis, was commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum to mark the museum's move from London to Leeds.  It intersperses movements from Catholic Mass, with the fifteenth century French folk song L’homme armé and texts selected by Guy Wilson, then Master of the museum, from other religious, literary and historical sources, including the Islamic call to prayer, the Bible, the Mahabharata and works by Kipling, Mallory, Tennyson, Swift, Dryden, Wilson himself and Sankichi Toge, a survivor the Hiroshima bombing, who later died of leukaemia.

Summer Concert 2014

 

Following their joint concert featuring Alexander L’Estrange’s Zimbe! in June 2012 in the Parish Church, and having joined forces with them in Liverpool for a concert in the Anglican Cathedral, the Royal Free Singers were glad to welcome the G:Force Gospel Choir back to Windsor for a third joint venture. The audience enjoyed a cocktail of music for a summer evening featuring songs in a variety of styles and traditions including gospel (of course), jazz, folk, end of the pier show and musical theatre, featuring the suite from Les Miserables.

G:Force, the Formby Arts College Gospel Choir, includes teachers, students, friends, family & colleagues making a truly inter-generational choir! Its repertoire covered many contemporary and classic gospel songs, including student-composed originals and new commissions.