On Saturday, April 2, at 7:00 p.m., the Great Hall at Pakachoag Church will ring with the sounds of the British choral tradition at its best.
The Wadham College Chapel Choir, a group made up of undergraduates, post-graduates, faculty, and friends of the University of Oxford’s Wadham College, kicks off its spring tour of the United States in Auburn with a program of sacred music by composers such as Gibbons, Ives, Greene, and Stanford, as well as arrangements of American spirituals and traditional English folk songs.
Program to include sacred music by composers such as Gibbons, Ives, Greene, and Stanford, as well as arrangements of American spirituals and traditional English folk songs.
FREE ADMISSION. For more information or to reserve priority seating, contact the church office at office@pakachoag.org or 508-755-8718.
Underwritten by the Lillian Eldred Knowles Fund of Pakachoag Church for the Support of Sacred Music.
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. Before that, she began her career at Chestnut St. Congregational Church in Worcester, where she made many life-long friends whom she visits as often as possible. 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.