Manchester Chamber Choir presents There Is A Country.

Principal Conductor: Vicente Chavarría

Organist: Gary Hulme

There Is A Country includes favourites from the early-twentieth-century English choral tradition. The programme centres around Sir Hubert Parry's Songs of Farewell, one of his final works. A collection of choral motets, the Songs are settings of texts by English poets from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the Book of Common Prayer translation of Psalm 39. They represent consolation and hope at a time of great despair; Parry lost friends and students in World War I and did not live to see the armistice. His Songs of Farewell reflect both his grief and his vision for a time of peace.

In stark contrast, Parry's famous I Was Glad, written for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902, is meant to evoke the grandeur of the occasion. Frederick Bridge, then-Director of Music at…