Tag: Ellie Slorach

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Kantos Chamber Choir – Hope on Earth – Live Review

Saturday 20 June 2026

Manchester Monastery, Gorton Lane, Manchester

★★★★★

Kantos Chamber Choir celebrates its tenth anniversary in stunning surroundings and an amazing acoustic

Kantos, RNCM and the University of Manchester Chamber Choirs, with conductor Ellie Slorach. Image © The AC Product

It’s ten years since Claire Shercliff (Company Director) and Ellie Slorach (Creative Director) founded Kantos Chamber Choir. On Saturday evening, at the after-show party in the beautiful garden of Manchester Monastery, we celebrated with a glass of prosecco while a helicopter flew overhead. There was speculation that the King would jump out of the helicopter, just as the Queen appeared to do at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics… but it turned out the helicopter was entirely unrelated. Slorach recounted some recent highlights, including singing in Victoria Baths, backing Gary Numan at his gig in the Royal Albert Hall, performing Angel’s Bone at Aviva Studios with English National Opera, and, of course, Saturday’s concert.

Co-founders Claire Shercliff (Company Director) and Ellie Slorach (Creative Director)

Slorach and Shercliff have links with the RNCM and the University of Manchester, so they invited the chamber choirs from both institutions to join the tenth-anniversary festivities. Members of Kantos wore yellow ribbons, and the others wore green and purple respectively. In a nice touch, Slorach wore a rosette of all three colours. Slorach described the concert’s epic four-part journey, from the creation of the Earth, to a reflection on the world, then to protest and peace, and finally to hope.

We began with Aaron Copland’s In the Beginning, which describes the creation story, using text from the Book of Genesis in the King James Bible. The mezzo soprano soloist, Lorna Day, walked down the aisle from the back of the Monastery to join the choir, singing in a rich, warm voice with clear diction and excellent projection. Slorach controlled the dynamics of the large choir beautifully in the cathedral-like acoustic. Her gestures were precise and fairly undemonstrative, but at the end of the piece, she spread her arms wide on the celebratory words, ‘and man became a living soul’, a stunning climax.

From the moment of creation, we passed to a reflection on what was happening on Earth. Renaldo ‘Obie’ Benson, a member of the Motown vocal group the Four Tops, began writing What’s Going On (arranged here by Rollo Dilworth) in response to an incident of police brutality he witnessed in Berkeley, California. Marvin Gaye gave the piece its evocative title in response to the Watts riots in Los Angeles: ‘With the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?’ But Benson clarified, ‘I’m not protesting, I want to know what’s going on.’ The jazzy, soulful arrangement featured a fine solo from tenor Matt Pope, chromatic harmonies and a ravishing final chord.

Performing Meredith Monk’s Earth Seen From Above. Image © The AC Product

Meredith Monk’s Earth Seen From Above zooms out and looks at humanity from far above. Monk asked that the piece be sung without scores and specified specific physical gestures for the choir to perform. The choir repeated the syllables ‘Nn Doh’, as they surrounded us: Monk wrote, ‘The idea of the piece is to make the whole space reverberate.’ The choir achieved this perfectly as they moved amongst us. Sometimes they dropped their heads in time with the rhythm, as if in supplication or worship, or as if being controlled by an external puppet master. At other times, they stared blankly into space, or spun eerily round; what were their thoughts? Were they robots? However you interpreted their gestures, the effect was compelling and strangely moving.

From reflection, we passed to protest and peace, starting with an arrangement of Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind, arranged by Liv Muir, their first arrangement for Kantos. This was a gentle and folky, sometimes reminiscent of John Rutter’s Christmas carols. There were lovely, lyrical tenor solos from Matt Pope and Will Anderson. Peace broke through in Arnold Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden (Peace on Earth). This began with a hymn-like section with an atonal edge: Schoenberg was moving away from late Romanticism into a new atonal phase, with uneasy harmonies representing a yearning for peace, sometimes deliciously discordant. Make no mistake; this is difficult music for the singers – Schoenberg at one point created an orchestral accompaniment to help keep the singers in tune and in time. But singing a cappella, the choir’s intonation and ensemble on Saturday evening were very strong, even in the most chromatic sections and on the highest notes. The piece ended with the stunning affirmation, trumpets resounding with the words, ‘Friede, Friede, auf der Erde!’

The chromaticism at the start of Charlie Perry’s arrangement of Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come was very different from Schoenberg’s. This was hopeful and joyful, a gentle, lilting version, with an ardent solo from Will Anderson. This was good programming, too – Sam Cooke was inspired to write the song when he heard Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. And the hopeful ending of Cooke’s song, with its repeated phrase ‘A change is gonna come’, cleverly morphed into Thomas Tallis’ late 16th-century 40-part motet Spem in Alium (I have never put my hope in anyone/Other than thee, God of Israel).

Kantos, RNCM and the University of Manchester Chamber Choirs, with conductor Ellie Slorach. Image © The AC Product

Tallis’ piece still sounds extraordinary, around 450 years after it was written. He was exploring surround sound centuries before Mahler’s use of offstage performers in works such as his Second Symphony, never mind the far more recent innovations of quadraphonic, 5.1 or Dolby Atmos. Slorach placed the 40 singers around the audience so that they were closer to us than to one another, which required great confidence from the individual singers. As in Meredith Monk’s piece, they rose to the challenge of performing at a distance from each other. Great waves of sound washed over us as themes passed from one section of the choir to another. The sudden chord change on the words ‘respice humilitatem nostram’ was astonishing, and there was a joyful echo at the end. The concert concluded with another expression of hope: Peter Hicks’ gorgeous arrangement of What A Wonderful World by Thiele & Weiss. The choir remained in their Spem in Alium positions around us, and we were wrapped in a blanket of joy and warmth. A well-deserved standing ovation soon broke out.

Slorach told us afterwards that she and Claire Shercliff’s aim with Kantos was always to bring ‘exceptional singing’ of a professional quality to the North of England. They have definitely achieved that. They bring a keen musical intelligence to their programming and a highly imaginative sense of theatre. Here’s to the next ten years!

Repertoire

Aaron Copland In the Beginning
Marvin Gaye arr. Rollo Dilworth What’s Going On
Meredith Monk Earth Seen From Above
Bob Dylan arr. Liv Muir Blowin’ in the Wind
Arnold Schoenberg Friede auf Erden
Sam Cooke arr. Charlie Perry A Change is Gonna Come
Thomas Tallis Spem in alium
Thiele & Weiss arr. Peter Hicks What A Wonderful World

Performers

Ellie Slorach Creative Director & Conductor
Kantos Chamber Choir
Royal Northern College of Music Chamber Choir
University of Manchester Chamber Choir

Now read on…

Kantos Chamber Choir: Kantos x helios x victoria baths – Live Review
Kantos Chamber Choir – The Witch Trials – Live Review
Kantos Chamber Choir – Behold the Sea – Live Review
Off the Beaten Track #11: The Wanderer by Tim Benjamin
Off the Beaten Track #10: The Seafarer by Tim Benjamin

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Kantos Chamber Choir: Kantos x helios x victoria baths – Live Review

Thursday 19 March 2026

Victoria Baths, Manchester

★★★★★

This was not just a concert; it was an immersive experience, taking us from dawn to dusk

Image © Adam Critchlow

Many contemporary artworks and installations describe themselves as ‘immersive’; the word is perhaps overused now. A concert in a former swimming pool (yes, actually in the pool) could have been immersive in another sense, but fortunately, the water had been removed first. For a choral concert to be truly immersive is very unusual, and it’s a tribute to Ellie Slorach, Kantos Chamber Choir’s Creative Director and Conductor, that the concert’s staging was so effective. The music ebbed and flowed, creating a continuous narrative and a musical argument, so that it was sometimes difficult to tell where one piece ended and the next began. The generous acoustics of the former swimming pool immersed us in sound, creating a lovely bloom around the voices, but it was still possible to hear individual voices perfectly. The huge golden sun, or ‘Helios’, created by the artist Luke Jerram, was suspended above us, immersing us in a sun-baked landscape.

Image © Adam Critchlow
Image © Adam Critchlow

Slorach greeted us with a cheery ‘good morning’; it was 5.00 am, and the sun was about to rise. Magically, a Dawn Chorus of singers surrounded us, singing from changing cubicles that were transformed into birdboxes. Above the backdrop of offstage chords, individual singers sang birdcalls. Being neither a twitcher nor an ornithologist, I was only able to identify a cuckoo, but composer David Matthews says ‘they’re not exact replicas, but artistic approximations.’

Meredith Monk’s Early Morning Melody was passed among the singers as they moved around the old baths, processing like monks singing plainsong. Slorach conducted from the middle of the audience as the singers surrounded us, singing Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque (Light and Gold). This piece described ‘Light, warm and heavy as pure gold’, like the sun above us. Whitacre’s falling chromatic harmonies sometimes felt like those of the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo, born 460 years ago.

The men of the choir dashed to their positions at the front to create the Dawn and Dusk sounds in Ken Stevens’ piece, chanting like the All Blacks performing the Haka. There was clapping, finger-clicking, animal noises, amazing vocal swoops and joyfully syncopated polyrhythms. The Eternal Sun, as depicted by John Tavener, featured lovely key changes and dissonances, uneasily shifting yet ecstatic, while an offstage choir sang fiercely nostalgic chords.

Conductor Ellie Slorach. Image © Adam Critchlow

Two composers described the Morning Star. Nathan James Dean took Milton’s words, ‘Now the bright morning Star, Dayes harbinger/Comes dancing from the East’ to create a lively, dancing theme like some of John Rutter’s Christmas carols, with syncopated lower voices. At the end, voices fell over each other like birdsong. Arvo Pärt’s Morning Star was a highlight, with rich, warm vibrato from the basses.

George Harrison’s Here Comes the Sun is The Beatles’ most popular song, with 1,788,000,858 plays (and counting) on Spotify at the time of writing. As the sun rose, the song was uplifting in Kirby Shaw’s close-harmony arrangement. Ben Nobuto’s Sol was a more frantic yet playful view of the sun than Harrison’s gentle, welcoming one. It featured repeated words, snatched syllables, excerpts from romantic songs, and a human menagerie, with manic chatter. This was virtuosic music, virtuosically sung.

The hall darkened, and Eric Whitacre’s gorgeous dissonances returned in Nox Aurumque (Night and Gold), which sings of night and death. This was another highlight, with robust, passionate singing; the sopranos shone on their high notes, and the tenors sang with a bright, ardent tone. Hendrik Hofmeyr’s Desert Sun was a dense, complex song of the Kalamari Bushmen, saluting the setting sun with falling, chromatic melodies at the start and cacophonous chanting later, all beautifully executed by the choir.

Night and sleep came quickly now. Emeli Sandé’s Where I Sleep, arranged by Alexander L’Estrange, felt like a spiritual, with superb tenor and alto solos. Nightfall was depicted by Meredith Monk, with a repeating bass line, as in Purcell’s An Evening Hymn, which begins,

‘Now that the sun hath veil’d his light,
And bid the world goodnight;
To the soft bed my body I dispose…’

Monk’s piece features wordless voices, but the sentiment is the same. After the complexity of some of the previous pieces, Monk’s simple, tonal world felt cathartic. The choir gradually left the stage, like musicians in Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. Slorach herself then left, leaving a single bass and a soprano decorating the bass line. They left, too, as the birds retreated into their bird boxes again. A stunning end to a concert that was not just a concert, but a life-affirming experience.

Image © Adam Critchlow

Creative Team

Kantos Chamber Choir:
Soprano Emily Brown Gibson, Eleonore Cockerham, Felicity Hayward, Sarah Keirle-Dos Santos, Emily Varney
Alto Louise Ashdown, Toluwani Idowu, Rachel Singer, Lucy Vallis
Tenor Alistair Donaghue, Jonny Maxwell-Hyde, Louis de Satgé, James Savage-Hanford Bass James Connolly, Jonny Hill, Joshua McCullough, David Valsamidis
Ellie Slorach Creative Director & Conductor
Luke Jerram Artwork

Repertoire

David Matthews Dawn Chorus
Meredith Monk Early Morning Melody
Eric Whitacre Lux Aurumque
Ken Steven Dawn and Dusk
John Tavener The Eternal Sun
Nathan James Dearden The Bright Morning-Star
Arvo Pärt Morning Star
George Harrison arr. Kirby Shaw Here Comes the Sun
Ben Nobuto Sol
Eric Whitacre Nox Aurumque
Hendrik Hofmeyr Desert sun
Emeli Sandé arr. Alexander L’Estrange Where I Sleep
Meredith Monk Nightfall

Luke Jerram’s Helios installation is at Victoria Baths until the 6th April 2026

More about Kantos Chamber Choir

Kantos Chamber Choir – The Witch Trials – Live Review
Kantos Chamber Choir – Behold the Sea – Live Review
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Kantos Chamber Choir – The Witch Trials – Live Review

Friday 14 November 2025

RNCM, Manchester

*****

A spellbinding and emotional journey through a historical travesty of justice

The Pendle Witch trials of 1612 have left a deep scar in our collective memory in the North of England, just as several centuries later, the Moors Murders have left a deep scar in our communal psyche. It’s easy to convince ourselves that the hanging of eight women and two men in Lancashire at the start of the seventeenth century is no longer relevant in our supposedly sophisticated times. On Friday, Kantos Chamber Choir convinced us that the Witch Trials are not only relevant today but also offer lessons about human nature. The American composer John Adams, in his rewriting of the story of Scheherazade, drew contemporary parallels to the ongoing oppression of women at a recent Hallé concert in Manchester. Writing in The Guardian on the 400th Anniversary of the Witch Trials, Martin Wainwright described ‘the timeless scapegoating, misogyny and cynical authority’ of a trial in which the two judges used ‘to further their careers’ and the government used ‘to crack down on opposition at a turbulent time.’ Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate in 2012, whose poem about the Witch Trials we heard at the end of the concert, said at the time,

‘I was struck by the echoes of under-privilege and hostility to the poor, the outside, the desperate, which are audible still.’

Those echoes could still be heard in last Friday’s concert. Kantos Chamber Choir devised the programme for performance at Pendle Heritage Centre, and later performed it in Pendle Castle, where the Witch Trials took place. The concert combined dramatic movement with music from around the time of the Trials and contemporary music, and texts from the Trials. This created a spellbinding and profoundly moving narrative, performed as a continuous sequence without applause.

Illustration from William Harrison Ainsworth’s novel The Lancashire Witches (1849)

The concert began unexpectedly, breaking into our mundane world. We heard the plainchant Requiem Aeternam coming from offstage as the choir processed on, a prayer for peace for those who were condemned to death at the Trials. There was a beautiful cacophony of sounds as the singers spread into the audience. The babel of voices created a mesmerising effect.

Above a long drone, there was a spellbinding moment as gorgeous solo soprano voices intoned Hildegard von Bingen’s Quia Ergo Femina, a celebration of the Virgin Mary, but also of ‘womankind’s nature and beauty.’ A list of the accused, mostly women, was chanted by choir members as they patrolled the stage.

Another prayer for mercy was an early highlight. Allegri’s Miserere, beautifully controlled by Ellie Slorach’s calm and precise conducting. The offstage choir featured Eleonore Cockerham, who sang the spine-chilling top C perfectly. The main choir sang with rich, warm voices, impeccable tuning and excellent ensemble in the plainsong passages.

Gesualdo’s astonishingly chromatic O Vos Omnes was bookended by accounts of the alleged witchcraft of ‘Old Demdike’ (Elizabeth Southerns). The text, from the Biblical Book of Lamentations, could refer to the profound sorrow the accused felt upon being condemned to death. But the composer was also notorious for murdering his first wife and her lover, for which he wasn’t punished, in another travesty of justice. In a further twist, his second wife ordered two of Gesualdo’s lovers to be tried for witchcraft.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Macbeth Act IV Scene i

Image: Macbeth, Banquo and the witches on the heath by Henry Fuseli

A new commission, Double, Double, Toil and Trouble by Anna Disley-Simpson, a setting of the witches’ spell from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (written only a few years before the Pendle Witch Trials) brought a note of humour to the proceedings. Disley-Simpson said it was fun to set words like ‘eye of newt and toe of frog.’ She described the piece as ‘a twisted and urgent nursery rhyme.’ The choir had fun as they perfectly negotiated the syncopated, bouncing rhythms of the multiple vocal lines. Further spoken words about the trial of ‘Old Chattox’ surrounded Ellie Slorach’s imaginative reworking of Barbara Strozzi’s Che si può fare. Her arrangement retained the melody soaring above contemporary vocal techniques such as ‘repeated fast exhale and inhale’ to illustrate the poet’s suffering and difficulty breathing. The piece blossomed into a moment of sheer invigorating joy as the singers allowed their vibrato to be more expansive, followed by a gorgeous, contemplative ending as the poet contemplated death.

Two of the alleged witches, Anne Whittle (Chattox) and her daughter Anne Redferne. Illustration from William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1849 novel The Lancashire Witches

The climax of the trial narrative came with The Verdict, delivered by the men of the choir. Ironically, the voices speaking in unison sounded like the congregation praying together in church. But this text, delivered with some urgency, condemned the accused to execution by hanging, with another call for mercy: ‘may God have mercy on your souls.’ After the emotional wrench of the verdict, the gently anguished polyphony of Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus (Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, from Psalm 42) was a welcome palette-cleanser.

Lancaster Castle Well Tower, also known as the Witches Tower. It is said to have held the Pendle witches before their trial. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Camden Reeves’ Spells, Remedies and Potions, three motets for sopranos, was written in 2017. Reeves wrote his own texts, based on the fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) by Henricus Institor (the German clergyman Heinrich Kramer). This text suggested the use of torture to extract confessions from ‘witches’, and was partly responsible for the instigation of the witch trials. Reeves described the book as,

‘a sobering lesson from history: a mirror to our own actions in the present day that reflects our cruelty back to us in all its ugliness.’

The first two motets aptly fitted Reeves’ description of them as ‘Black Sabbath and Metallica, but for sopranos.’ The late Ozzy Osbourne would have been proud. Repeated vocal riffs and angular lines twisting round each other, sounding like heavy metal. In the final motet, the singers turned to face the soprano soloist Eleonore Cockerham as she sang a long, slow melody from the back of the stage. Her voice was now viscerally operatic, a complete contrast with the pure tone she brought to the Allegri Miserere earlier. The piece ended with some lovely, scrunchy harmonies reminiscent of the French composer Francis Poulenc.

‘A sobering lesson from history.’ The fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The concert ended with Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, which ended with the words,

Away from Castle, Jury, Judge, huge crowd, rough rope, short drop, no grave
Only future tourists who might grieve.

We were the grieving tourists witnessing the death of the ‘witches.’ Conductor Ellie Slorach said in an interview for the RNCM that she wanted to,

‘…send them off in peace; it’s almost like an apology, an acknowledgement of the fact that they were obviously so mistreated.’

The plainchant In Paradisum, with multilayered voices as in the opening Requiem Aeternam, provided hope of paradise for those who had been hanged. The women of the choir left the stage, each with a male hand on their shoulder as if being led to their death, or perhaps escorted into paradise. They left the hall as they sang, creating a magical effect like the end of Gustav Holst’s Neptune at the end of his Planets suite. We heard a single, poignant ‘Amen’ from outside the hall; a stunning ending to a superb concert.

Members of Kantos Chamber Choir with Conductor Ellis Slorach. Source: kantoschamberchoir.com

The programme is being recorded for release on Delphian Records.

Sources

Digital Programme Notes provided by Kantos Chamber Choir
Martin Wainwright, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy on the Pendle witches (The Guardian 15 August 2012)
Sarah Walters, Interview with Ellie Slorach (The RNCM Blog 3 July 2025)

Read on…

Kantos Chamber Choir – Behold the Sea – Live Review
Off the Beaten Track #11: The Wanderer by Tim Benjamin
Off the Beaten Track #10: The Seafarer by Tim Benjamin