The Choir of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Kirsty Whatley & David Skinner
Biographie The Choir of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Kirsty Whatley & David Skinner
David Skinner
(DPhil, Oxon) is Fellow and Osborn Director of Music at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and artistic director of Alamire. His research has centred around music institutions, manuscripts and composers of 16th-century Europe, and is particular specialism is music and the Reformation in England. A large portion of his doctoral thesis was published in the Roxburghe Club volume The Arundel Choirbook (Arundel: Duke of Norfolk, 2003), and he has since published a number of music editions, facsimile volumes, and articles. as well as more than 30 commercial recordings (awards including Gramophone, BBC Music, Limelight, Times CD of the Year, and others). Dr Skinner’s recent publications include The Anne Boleyn Music Book: Facsimile with Introduction, DIAMM Facsimiles 6 (London: Royal College of Music, 2017), and ‘‘Deliuer me from my deceytful ennemies’: A Tallis Contrafactum in Time of War’, Early Music (Oxford University Press, 2017). The latter project, in which Queen Catherine Parr was identified as the author of a contrafact of Tallis’s grandest antiphon Gaude gloriosa dei mater, received wide media coverage including all major broadsheets, BBC 4 Today Programme and BBC Breakfast News. As a presenter he has worked extensively for BBC radio, appearing in and writing a variety of shows on Radio 3 and 4. He acted as music advisor for the Music and Monarchy series on BBC 2 with David Starkey, and was Music Consultant for the recent BBC4 documentary on the history of Evensong with Lucy Worsley. He is currently General Editor of the prestigious Early English Church Music series (The British Academy: Stainer & Bell) for whom is is completing a new edition of Tallis’s Latin church music.
Kirsty Whatley
studied in Manchester and Switzerland, and has worked as a performer, recording artist and teacher for many years. She has performed live on BBC radio and television, and on national radio stations abroad. After completing an MMus at the University of Manchester focussing on contemporary harp, she went on to postgraduate study in Basel, Switzerland, specialising in harps of the Renaissance and Baroque. With these, she appears on recordings such as the Taverner Consort’s L’Orfeo and their Gramophone-Award-winning Western Wynd; Alamire’s The Anne Boleyn Songbook; Fretwork’s In Chains of Gold; and I Fagiolini’s Leonardo: Shaping the Invisible, amongst many others. She has performed with groups such as The BBC Singers, Moscow City Ballet, London Handel Orchestra, English Touring Opera, I Fagiolini, Alamire, Taverner Consort, Ensemble Leones, Tetraktys, Stavangar Baroque, and Courtiers of Grace. With modern harp, over the years she has covered much of the standard orchestral and choral society repertoire, regularly supporting music-making in her local communities.
The Choir of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
The Choir comprises approximately 25 singers and two Organ Scholars, from both Sidney and other colleges in the University. They sing two Evensongs a week, plus a number of special services and concerts. The Choir also performs internationally: recent venues include the Carnegie Hall, St. Peter's Basilica and the Dubai Opera.
