2022/23 Season
As the effects of the Great Plague became more manageable, we returned to performing live concerts. Paul Grindlay joined us as interim Artistic Director. It was a great pleasure to sing for a live audience once again and our concerts were a great success!
Winter Concert December 4, 2022
CRSP performed our first in-person concert since December 2019! Under the direction of our Acting Director, Paul Grindlay, we very much enjoyed performing before a live audience again after so long.
This concert featured a very diverse program, as well as our ever popular pre-concert talk by our bass Nick Zekulin. We performed Medieval plainchant, seasonal Renaissance favourites, a tribute to the late Queen Elizebeth II and loved ones lost during the pandemic, plus new music by Ola Gjeilo, Morten Laurisden and Kerensa Briggs. Instrumentalist Ralph Maier performed on the theorbo and organist Colin Redekop and Paul Grindlay himself performed a bass solo.We will continue to perform live concerts as government regulations allow - just as we have done since 1970!
We also held our popular Wall of Wine raffle and 4 lucky attendees won 4 beautiful high quality boxes of wine and accessories.
Spring Concert May 7, 2023
This "divers(e)" program brought together works from Renaissance and modern periods, and from both European and Indigenous cultures. In the Indigenous tradition, special guest Cheryle Chagnon-Greyeyes performed a Welcome Song. The concert featured several pieces by Canadian Cree composer, Andrew Balfour, including two pieces he wrote for Vancouver's Musica Intima, with music by Renaissance/Baroque composers (Gibbons and Purcell) and new Cree texts. In a slightly subversive act of reverse-colonization, these indigenous texts create different soundscapes and allow for new interpretations of old favourites.
Selections from the early music repertoire included beloved works such as Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus and Tallis’ If Ye Love Me. One highlight was performing a piece by the obscure and innovative English early Baroque composer, George Jeffreys (c.1610-1685). His music represents a unique amalgamation of English Renaissance polyphony and the new "seconda pratica" of the early Italian Baroque, known as "stile moderno" or "nuove musiche." Organist Jim Picken joined the choir to perform Jeffreys’ He Beheld the City. And because 2023 was the 400th anniversary of the deaths of William Byrd and Thomas Weelkes, we performed a madrigal by each of them for this concert.
Another wonderful experience was performing original compositions by CRSP Artistic Directors, past and present: Anthony Petti, Peter Togni, Jane Perry and Paul Grindlay.