The Roll 2011
Friends of the Choir Girton College Choir has gained a reputation as one of Cambridge’s most highly regarded choirs (a recent concert review rated it ‘among the best’ of its kind). As well as singing services in the College Chapel, the choir frequently performs outside Cambridge. Termly visits are made to cathedrals (including, in the last few years, Canterbury, St Paul’s, York Minster and Westminster Abbey). The choir also travels overseas at least once a year. Highlights in the choir’s history include a tour to Italy in 1996, during which the choir sang at a Mass in St Peter’s and performed to a live audience of 10,000, including Pope John Paul II. In 1999 the choir took part in the Kumamoto International Youth Festival and the Takarazuka International Chamber Chorus Contest in Japan, winning, among other prizes, the Gold Medal in the mixed chorus division and the inaugural Grossmann Prize, awarded to the ensemble with the best choral sound. More recently, in the summer of 2007, the choir won third prize (out of ninety entries from across the globe) in the 44th Spittal International Choir Competition in Austria. Other countries visited in recent years include Mexico, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, Ireland and France. Girton College Choir recorded its first CD (All in a Garden Green) in 1995. A second recording (Cantique) was released in 1998. Summer 2000 brought a CD of Italian Baroque music accompanied by period instruments (O Porta Caeli), while a recording of Tudor and twentieth-century music (The Ages of Elizabeth) was brought out in 2002. A recording of Christmas music from the seventeenth and twentieth centuries with players from the Gabrieli Ensemble (Res Miranda) followed in 2005. The choir’s most recent CD, A Feast Celestial, features French and English music of the last hundred years. In recent years the choir has benefited greatly from the support of many people, especially the Friends and Patrons, whose support has made overseas tours possible. To help foster choral music in Girton, I should like to ask you to consider supporting the choir on a regular basis: Friends contribute £20 per annum, Patrons £50 or more. Friends receive notification of and free admission to an annual Friends’ Concert; Patrons may also, if they wish, have their contributions acknowledged in concert programmes. Would you be willing to help? Dr Martin Ennis, President
Friends of the Lawrence Room Another year, another Review, and so much to report. The weekly opening of our lovely museum, made possible by a loyal group of Old Girtonian volunteers, is now a wellestablished feature of the College calendar. In September Christopher Evans, Director of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, gave the first annual Friends of the Lawrence Room talk in a packed Fellows’ Drawing Room. His fascinating account of past and present excavations and finds in the vicinity of the College ended with a challenge to us to find the funds for a geophysical survey of the College site. Such a survey would locate precisely the known Anglo-Saxon cemetery and should find the course of the Via Devana and any 105