Please come and enjoy a noon day treat from this special choir on spring tour from Oxford in the UK. The program is free and will begin at noon in the Church.
The Wadham College Chapel Choir is made up of undergraduates, post-graduates, faculty, and friends of the University of Oxford’s Wadham College,. The choir’s main responsibility is singing the bi-weekly Evensong services in the candle-lit seventeenth-century college chapel, but in addition it sings at special events, services, and concerts, as well as occasional excursions on the local river, punting and singing English madrigals. Over recent years the choir has undertaken tours to Copenhagen, Budapest, Krakow, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, as well as Edinburgh, London, and other cities in the United Kingdom. Because its chief responsibility is to provide music in the Chapel, the choir’s repertoire is principally Anglican sacred music from the fifteenth century to the present day. The singers enjoy other music as well, and often expand into the realm of secular music.
Katharine Pardee is Director of Chapel Music at Wadham College, as well as Betts Fellow in Organ Studies, and Lecturer in Music at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. Before moving to England in 2001, she served on the music faculties of Syracuse University and the Eastman School of Music in New York, USA. Active as a teacher and performer, she has performed widely in the United States and in Europe, and has recorded twice on the Pro Organo label. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in organ performance and literature at the Eastman School, as well as a DPhil in musicology from the University of Oxford. She is currently combining a career as a performer with academic research into Bach in nineteenth-century England.
The Choir’s Spring tour will include sacred music by composers such as Gibbons, Ives, Greene, and Stanford, as well as arrangements of American spirituals and traditional English folk songs.