Portsmouth Baroque Choir - Autumn Concert at St George's, Whyke

2024 has been a major year for composer anniversaries. Portsmouth Baroque Choir has looked back across 450 years and selected a half-dozen names associated with choral music to celebrate alongside the programme’s main feature, the centenary of the death of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford: Robert White (d. 1574), John Wilbye (baptised1574), Giacomo Carissimi (d. 1674), Anton Bruckner (b. 1824), Edward Bairstow (b. 1874) and Giacomo Puccini who, like Stanford, died in 1924.

Singers need no reminders about the quality of Stanford's choral music: The Blue Bird remains one of the most celebrated of all partsongs and anyone in the UK born before 1970 will have benefitted from Stanford’s work as the main compiler of the National Songbook (1906). The Choir will be singing and organist Peter Gould will be playing compositions by Stanford from the period prior to World War 1: Song of Peace and Wisdom of Wisdom from his 1909 Bible Songs, 3 Latin Motets (1905), For Lo, I raise up (1914, but unpublished until 1939), Te Deum in B flat (1898), Postlude in D minor (1908).

Ask any choir member what their favourite companion pieces to the Stanford motets would be and it is almost certain the answer will be those monumental equivalents by Bruckner especially Locus iste, committed to memory by most singers at about the age of 21. The Choir will perform three other motets by Bruckner: Christus factus est, Os justi and the rarely heard Pange lingua.

Robert White died of the Plague in 1574. Highly regarded by his contemporaries, our programme opens with the fourth and last of his settings of the Compline hymn Christe qui lux es et dies. Sally Dunkley wrote: “Nowhere is White’s art better displayed than in this exquisite miniature whose penultimate verse opens up absolute simplicity into gently flowing quaver patters”.

Baptised in 1574, John Wilbye’s emotionally charged madrigals are also firm choir favourites, especially the ravishing harmonies of Draw on, sweet night.

Giacomo Carissimi established the characteristics of the Latin oratorio that passed on to Handel. Dramatic energy abounds in his setting of the words of Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus.


Puccini’s very short Requiem was written in 1905 to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the death of Verdi and uses the same ‘enigmatic scale’ used by Verdi in his 4 Sacred Pieces.

The most recent piece in the programme is Bairstow’s I sat down under his shadow from 1925. Its mystical flavour suggests a connection with Bairstow’s exact contemporary, Gustav Holst.

Anniversaries benefit cultural recognition, engaging community and media interest. They also help sustain and sometimes rekindle a composer’s legacy.