An Evening of Music, 9 July 2011
An Evening of Music given on Saturday 9 July by Haverfordwest Ladies Choir in St. Martin's Church, combined with a recent morning's singing by the choir at Withybush Hospital, raised nearly £400 for the Paul Sartori Foundation and Macmillan Cancer Support.
The choir was conducted by Dr. Nancy Mann, with Gerald Nicholas as accompanist, and opened with an appropriate batch of spirituals, many written by recent younger American composers like Gerald T. Smith and Rollo Dilworth, and the particularly moving 'Swing low, sweet chariot', arranged by a Scotsman, Hugh S. Roberton. There were fine solos in this set from two recent choir recruits Frances Oates and Jacqueline Williams.
The evening's main guests, the recorder group Joyful Noise, gave the audience John Pitts' arrangements of pieces by Mozart and Brahms and of contemporary songs, including the jaunty 'American Patrol'. The choir's central set included several popular Celtic songs like the Male Voice favourite, 'Gwahoddiad', but also featured one of their most appealing items, John Rutter's 'When daisies pied', which highlights the choir's capacity to sustain a lightness of tone.
St. Martin's Church cannot often have been host to sounds like the next item, the swinging sixties saxophone of Inka Lesinska, but Inka's version of 'The girl from Ipanema' was followed by choir and audience joining in the round, 'Sumer is icumen in', which was written only slightly after St. Martin's itself was built.
The choir's final set of American songs featured soloists Stephanie Dewick and Carol Mayhew, in Amanda McBroom's 'The rose', as well as Gershwin's lyrical 'Someone to watch over me' and Cy Coleman's crisp and witty 'Rhythm of life'.
The concert honoured the memory of five people who were very important to the choir; Mirek Wismont-Lesinski, Hugh Mostyn Morgan, Jo Parry, Reverend John Jewsbury and Elizabeth Hammond.
Robert Nisbet
