The Bridge Singers’ summer concerts in 2022, which were postponed from 2020, had the theme of Queens in my mind and in the planning, although not in the advertising (we didn’t want to be jumping on the Jubilee bandwagon)! I had always wanted to do Come Ye Sons Of Art by Purcell with this choir, as I’ve always loved it since we sang it with Mr. Holmes when I was at high school. If we’d done this concert in 2020 as originally planned, it would have been with piano accompaniment, and it would have been splendid, of course. However, in these intervening two years, I have made the acquaintance of members of the Westfield Brass Quintet who reside around these parts. I had the thought that Come Ye Sons Of Art would be very good indeed accompanied by brass quintet, so we hired them and I set to with the arranging. I loved this task, and the end result was very pleasing indeed. The choir and the audience loved the presence of the brass quintet, who also performed some of their own arrangements.

Come Ye Sons Of Art was composed by Purcell for a birthday of Queen Mary, as in William and Mary. Here’s one of the movements from the Purcell as performed in Warkworth church. The rest of the programme was also based around a Queen theme – nothing to do with the Jubilee of course, because this programme was devised in late 2019 – so we also sang songs by the group Queen and some folk songs with queens in them.