This year Norfolk Camerata will be celebrating at least 150 years of joyous music-making in and around North Walsham.
To mark this achievement, we will be presenting two performances of Benjamin Britten’s St Nicolas, in North Walsham on Saturday 13th May 2023, and St James’s church, Southrepps, on Saturday 20th May 2023.
Our concert in North Walsham will take place – most aptly – in St Nicolas’s Church. Britten’s cantata tells the story – partly real and partly legendary – of St Nicolas, the fourth-century Bishop of Myra in Asia Minor. Few facts about Nicolas’s life are known for certain, but it seems that he was born into a wealthy family; after his parents died of the plague he gave all his wealth to charity and went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On his later return to Myra he was appointed Bishop, serving there until his death. Little else is known about Nicolas but he is immortalised in many legends that tell of his care of the poor and oppressed, the most well known, perhaps, being that of his restoration to life of three small boys who at a time of famine had been pickled in brine by a wicked butcher. From this tale emerged the practice of giving presents to deserving children around the Feast of St. Nicolas on the 6th of December, and it is easy to see how the popular image of St. Nicolas gradually evolved into the much-loved figure of Santa Claus.
Saint Nicolas was Britten’s first large-scale work written with mainly amateur performers in mind, and is a wonderful example of his outstanding ability to capture the essence of his subject-matter with a series of dramatic yet essentially simple ideas to which performers and audiences can immediately relate.
(Acknowledgements: John Bawden.)