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Dublin’s Cantata Singers were founded by John Beckett in the 1970's, when he began the tradition of doing cantatas in St Ann’s on Sunday afternoons in February. He played the piano himself for the rehearsals.
The high point of the Cantata Singers came in 1979 when they were invited to do an all-J.S. Bach programme for the London Proms, conducted by John Beckett and with the previous incarnation of the Orchestra of St Cecilia, confusingly then called The New Irish Chamber Orchestra. The following year they did a similar concert in the Flanders Festival, in Bruges.
When John Beckett died in 2007, Rhoda Draper put together a memorial concert for him in St Ann’s. She contacted all the old Cantata Singers and a mighty proportion of them got back together for the concert, under David Milne. Since then we have regrouped twice, for Lindsay Armstrong - Short Biography’s Orchestra of St Cecilia: Bach Cantata Series in 2009 and 2010. |
