Dursley Male Voice Choir
As long as I have music Price, arr Humphreys
Reviens mon amour/So deep is the night Chopin/Miller, arr Cooper
Can’t help falling in love Perretti/Creatore/Weiss
Yesterday/When I’m 64 McCartney, Arr Cooper
Elizabeth Irvine – Soloist
Impossible dream Leigh, arr Cooper
Paint Your Wagon medley Lerner/Loewe, arr Simmons
Interval
Dursley Male Voice Choir
For the beauty of the earth Rutter
Harbour lights Kennedy/Williams, arr Cooper
Sea fever Masefield/Cooper
Animals are comin Bartholomew
Elizabeth Irvine and Dursley Male Voice Choir
Rhythm of Life Coleman/Fields, arr Barnes
Walk Away Jurgens, arr Simmons
Tell my Father Boyd/Wildhorn, arr Wood
Gwahoddiad Hartsough, arr Davies
The Dursley Male Voice Choir will be performing a varied programme that we are sure will please all tastes.
It will include music from West End Shows, including a rousing medley from Paint Your Wagon, together with well-known numbers especially arranged for male voices, including two songs written by Paul McCartney. This will be contrasted with John Rutter’s For the Beauty of the Earth and some pieces written especially for the choir.
A wonderful classical leaning will come from the accomplished mezzo soprano Elisabeth Irvine, our soloist for the evening.
Dursley Male Voice Choir was founded by a group of enthusiastic local singers in 1978 and has since grown to be one of the principal male voice choirs of the region, with up to 70 singers drawn from communities around Dursley and the wider Stroud district. This year it celebrates its 40th anniversary.
They perform around 12 concerts each year, the majority of them for charity. As well as local concerts the choir performs at many venues, around the UK and internationally. Memorable concerts include those whilst on tour in south-west Ireland in 2015, at St George’s Hall in Bristol in aid of Southmead Hospital, as well as recent concerts in the Colston Hall, Gloucester Cathedral and Cheltenham Town Hall. The choir toured Yorkshire in September 2017 singing at Harrogate and in Ripon Cathedral.
The choir has been under the musical direction of Barrie Cooper since 2003. Barrie had his first piano lesson over 60 years ago at Marling School in Stroud. He is a Licentiate of the Royal Schools of Music and over many years has been the accompanist and conductor of choirs as well as Musical Director of an amateur operatic society.
He has made numerous choral arrangements and composed major choral works. Barrie has an outstanding record of success in competitions, in particular at Cheltenham Festival for Performing Arts.
MEZZO SOPRANO Elizabeth Irvine read Music at Jesus College, Cambridge, where she also completed an M.Phil. She studied singing with John Llewellyn Evans. She has sung with many ensembles, including English Voices, the Early Opera Company and the Zürcher Sing-Akademie.
Her previous solo engagements include Himmelstimme in Cavelieri’s La rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo at the Staatsoper; choir soloist in staged performances of Handel’s Belshazzar in Toulouse and Berlin for René Jacobs; Bach’s Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis for Ton Koopman in the Tonhalle, Zurich; Rossini’s Stabat Mater and Mozart’s Requiem in the Cambridge Summer Music Festival, and Handel cantatas and duets at the Utrecht Festival of Early Music and Hasse’s Cajo Fabricio and
She has also performed Lucio Papirio Dittatore at the London Handel Festival, and Messiah in Gloucester Cathedral and in Tewkesbury Abbey as well as Bach’s St John Passion for Cantemus in Cardiff and St Matthew Passion in Romsey Abbey.
