Ex Cathedra: The Open Fund for Organisations
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A New Shakespeare Ode 2016
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2016 will be a great 400th anniversary year for Shakespeare. To mark this moment, Ex Cathedra, with partners the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the Shakespeare Institute, is commissioning one of Britain’s best-known composers, Sally Beamish to write a c.40-minute setting for a new Shakespeare Ode written by the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.
Our vision is for the new Ode to reflect our own times, or own reactions to Shakespeare and what he means for us today. Accessible but aesthetically ambitious, it will be an inclusive, dramatic and participatory piece, written for children and adult choirs and an English ‘broken consort’ of instruments.
This new commission will be performed by Ex Cathedra for the first time in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was baptised and buried, and this will be followed by performances at Town Hall, Birmingham; St Peter’s Wolverhampton; Southwell Minster; Milton Court, London; and Hereford Cathedral.
The concert will be presented in two halves, with the new Ode in the second half. The first half will include a staged ‘original practices’ 1769 Ode with Ex Cathedra performing Thomas Arne’s music.