Join us in St Nicholas’s Church, North Walsham on 5th July 2025 at 7.00 p.m. for the Last Night of the Proms.

The programme will include all the usual favourites plus Stanford’s Songs of the Fleet.

Flag waving of any kind will be welcome, whether that is the Union Jack, the EU flag, the Pride flag or the Norfolk flag, in celebration of great music enjoyed by people of all nations and creeds.

Songs of the Fleet was composed in 1910 as a sequel to the Songs of the Sea and is a setting of poems by Henry Newbolt.  With its quasi-operatic characterisations and dramatic retelling of the story of Richard Grenville’s heroic battle against the Spanish fleet in 1591, it’s easy to see why The Revenge was such a huge success across Britain after its first performance in 1886.

Our next event will be a Come and Sing Day in St Nicholas’s Church, North Walsham, on Saturday 5th April 2025 when we will rehearse and later perform a selection of choruses from this much loved work.

Tickets are £10 including score hire (under 18s and caregivers £5).  Bookings will be open from 1st December.

The day will commence at 9.30 for registration and will end with a free concert after the workshop.

Refreshments will be available.

We are grateful to the Paul Morgan Fund, the Paul Bassham Charitable Trust and North Walsham Commmunity Shop for financial support.

We would like to thank North Walsham Community Shop for their latest generous grant of £500 which enables us to invite distinguished soloists and musicians to accompany our performances.  A cheque was presented to Chair Maggie Smyth at the beginning of the Autumn term 2024 in St Nicholas’s Church.

Thank you to everyone who braved the wind, the rain and the wintry temperatures to come and listen to this lovely – and rarely performed – piece of festive music.

We were privileged to be accompanied by David Dunnett, organist at Norwich Cathedral, and conducted as usual by William Falconer.

Thanks to everyone who helped with refreshments and behind the scenes at St Nicholas’s Church and also to North Walsham Community Shop for financial support.

The next performance of the Norfolk Camerata will be on Saturday 23rd November at 7.30 p.m. at St Nicholas’s Church, North Walsham, Norfolk

The concert will feature Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit de Noel (Midnight Mass for Christmas) and other festive music.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier was one of the most outstanding musicians in late seventeenth-century France.  He was particularly drawn to writing Christmas music, producing instrumental carols, Latin oratorios on Christmas themes, French pastorales and a Christmas mass – the delightful Messe de Minuit pour Noël. This piece dates from around 1690 and was probably composed for the great Jesuit church of St. Louis in Paris, where Charpentier held the  post of maître de musique. The use of popular carols in church music had long been an accepted practice and in France noëls figured prominently in the substantial French organ repertoire. The liturgy of the Midnight Mass permitted the singing and playing of these Christmas folksongs, and by Charpentier’s time quite complex instrumental arrangements were commonplace. However, Charpentier’s idea of basing a whole mass on these songs was completely original. Altogether there are eleven noëls, most of which are dance-like in character, reflecting the carol’s secular origins, though Charpentier also composed new material, such as the slow sections ‘Et in terra pax’ at the beginning of the Gloria and ‘Et incarnatus est’ in the Credo. (Acknowledgements: John Bawden)

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