South Downs Soloists return to the Festival of Chichester

Palestrina’s powerful choral music will be sung alongside music from that time, plus new music influenced by the earlier styles featured.

The concert will be on Saturday, July 5 at 7:30pm in Boxgrove Priory Church, Church

Lane, Boxgrove, PO18 0EE. Tickets are £25 from The Novium, with proceeds going towards raising money for the homelessness charity Stonepillow.

Conducting will be George Haynes who set up the group around three years ago. He is delighted to have been able to establish their profile through the Festival of Chichester each year and to build up a following across successive concerts.

“I am a lay vicar at the cathedral but I like to do other projects and the idea was for me and a couple of other professionals to find a way that we could do that. The idea was to put together a professional group that would also give me the chance to conduct. I think we started in about 2022. One of the others is an ex-colleague from the cathedral and then there are the friends from other places such as London and Winchester Cathedral, all keen to do things outside of churches.

“And it has been good. Over the last few years we've done either one or two concerts a year. It is just an occasional project but it's really nice that mostly the same people come together, and we've really hooked ourselves onto the Festival of Chichester. It has been great for us. It's a home festival for me and we have really started to build up a following. People are interested in knowing what we're doing next. And it's also good to work with Stonepillow. We are pleased to support them.”

As for the repertoire: “It is me conducting eight pro singers so what we do has to be within the choral sphere but we do like to change it. We wouldn't want to do Renaissance two years in a row, and we wouldn’t want to do Baroque two years in a row. We like to try to be inventive.”

This year the inspiration is Palestrina: “And in this concert you can see the strands coming together that he influenced. He really grasped music and took it somewhere. He started writing a formula for really well polished choral music at that time. It just blends really perfectly. You never think it is jarring, and his influence continued. People have been influenced by his craft and even today composers who are really serious about composition will know about Palestrina. He is one of the big names in music and a big part of how music was shaped to become what it is now.”