Carrots, Cardigans For Choir’s Trip

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31052, 6 May 1966, Page 14

Carrots, Cardigans For Choir’s Trip

Christchurch choirs, which have raised large sums to travel to other centres are supporting sympathetically the efforts of the Auckland Dorian Singers who will fly to Christchurch at Queen’s Birthday week-end to give recitals in the Civic Theatre and in the Christchurch Cathedral. At each rehearsal the Dorian Singers’ conductor

(Mr Peter Godfrey) puts down his baton and picks up a hammer to auction anything from carrots to cardigans.

Mr Godfrey also planted a potato patch beside the new Holy Trinity Cathedral in Auckland. Members of the choir have saved tooth-paste tubes and even toy soldiers for scrap metal, run raffles, sold at stalls, held fund-raising “at homes," sung in commercial premises for fees, made individual gifts, and obtained grants from various trusts to provide more than £l2OO for the trip.

The choir of about 60 is rigorously selective in membership, present members being auditioned with new applicants every year. The size and excellence of the choir enables it to perform works beyond the normal choral society repertoire and include many unfamiliar pieces from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The Dorian Singers' Civic Theatre programme will include songs by WJLbye, Gibbons, Bateson, Vaughan Williams, Bartok and Britten, and Handel’s “Dixit Dominus.”

The Cathedral programme on the Sunday afternoon will include sixteenth-century, eucharistic, and contemporary motets.

The visit is being sponsored by the Christchurch Civic Music Council.