Sonare quartet line up dates in Billingshurst and Crawley

Sonare are coming to St Mary’s in Billingshurst on Sunday, April 10 and St Andrew’s in Crawley on Saturday, April 30 on their spring tour.

The quartet comprises Victoria Stilwell soprano; Stella Bracegirdle alto; Toby Churchley tenor; and George Salmon bass.

Soprano Vicki said: “We first met as choral scholars at St Luke at Hackney in east London back in the dim and distant mists of time or in other words, October 2019, but let’s face it, pre pandemic feels like a long time ago!

“Obviously we first came together by chance in a professional setting through our love of choral singing, but it was our desire to build something bigger and more permanent moving forward that compelled us to form the quartet.

“What was born out of a conversation in a beer garden has turned into a venture that’s now made up of so many different passions, projects and performances. We completed our inaugural tour back in the autumn of 2021.”

They are now on their spring tour, with a third planned for September of this year.

“We’re also deep into post-production on our first album, My Spirit Sang All Day, which is a collection of highlights from the first tour.

“We started Sonare with three aims really: to achieve excellence in choral music, and to gift our audiences with impassioned and exciting performances; to explore and promote music beyond the standard repertoire, with a particular focus on promoting the work of composers from under-represented groups (for example – our plan for the autumn tour is a programme made up entirely of female composers); and to bring classical music of the highest standard to communities where it’s not already easily available.

“In addition to our plans for achieving the second strand, so far we’ve achieved the third one by performing in a number of venues which have less than 50 per cent Arts Council engagement, and the first one, we know we’ve achieved from the glowing reviews from our first tour!

“For the four of us, as with countless other musicians and artists, the pandemic was a really difficult time, with so many traditional collaborative and performance opportunities taken away. With that in mind, we wanted to create something new, that was our own, and that we would be able to take as far and wide as we wanted, without relying on so many other things to fall into place first. We all come from long backgrounds within music (conducting, composing, teaching, performing, songwriting) and so the idea of re-emerging from the pandemic in our own authentic way felt like a great step forward.

“Our first tour was a real mix of repertoire – pieces we’ve always loved, stuff that was off the beaten track, a cross section of time periods, composers and sub-genres of choral music. This time around with Songs of Springtime, we wanted to create a really uplifting programme that was appropriate to the time of year, whilst also working within our original aims. We’ve got some crowd favourites in the form of Elgar, Saint-Saens and Stanford, whilst introducing lesser known pieces such as Moeran’s Songs of Springtime (from which the tour takes its name), and a whole section on unjustly neglected female composers.

“Looking to the future, we’ve got big plans for the next few years and are really grateful that we get to do what we love every day. It’s also been a baptism of fire in a lot of ways, but now we feel like there’s not much we can’t conquer. We’re really excited to bring Sonare, and exciting choral music, to bigger and bigger audiences.”

Advance discount tickets are available from sonarechoir.com (with a special rate for under 35s).

www.sonarechoir.com

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