Woolpit and Horringer choirs revive forgotten Easter cantata
"My first thought was, let's look it up and see if any scores are available online - but all I could find was two had been sold on Ebay," said Mr Slingsby."I then thought, well, someone will have performed it on YouTube, everything's there, but there was nothing at all."The 68-year-old retired music teacher unearthed two scores for the cantata among his father Geoffrey's music - one marked up by his grandmother Dolly and the other by Geoffrey. Dolly Slingsby was a member of St John's Church, Bury St Edmunds, and by the early 1930s, Geoffrey was one of its boy singers."Looking through, I could see my grandmother's writing in pencil, saying, 'stand' or 'sit' - and I surmised it must have been performed at St John's in the '30s," said Mr Slingsby.
All he could find out about Mr Witty online was a census return, describing him as a teacher and composer of music who had been born in 1865 in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, and lived most of his life in Hull and Bradford, Yorkshire."I thought, the piece must have fallen into obscurity, let's do it," he said - and the amateur choirs agreed.It shows influences of well-known Easter pieces like Stainer's The Crucifixion (1887) or John Maunder's Olivet de Calgary (1904), according to Mr Slingsby. "But unlike Stainer, it tells the whole Easter story from Gethsemane to the triumphal Resurrection," he said. "Sometimes, the more you do music, the more it grows on you and this has grown on me - and it seems to have hit the spot with the choirs."
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