Let’s Dance! – Kantos Chamber Choir on their upcoming summer concert

With their summer concert just a few days away, we caught up with Kantos Chamber Choir and their conductor Ellie Slorach for a quick chat about the programme for Let’s Dance! on Friday 14 July.

Your programme for this concert features a huge range of different musical styles and genres – What was the inspiration for the programme?

The inspiration was simply choral music inspired by dancing – having seen a few comments about choirs mainly singing ‘slow’ music(!), I thought I’d try to head in the opposite direction completely. Once I’d chosen this theme, I was then really in a playground for selecting repertoire, which has led to a programme that draws from all sorts of styles, genres, eras, and places across the world!

Is there are particular piece in the programme that you’re most looking forward to?

Meredith Monk’s Panda Chant II is going to be pretty fun to perform because we don’t have a conductor for that piece and I get to join in with the choir – it’s like a big team game with it’s challenging cross rhythms and body percussion. I think we’ll all get a kick out of performing that one…!  

Let’s talk more about Kantos as a group – How did the choir get started? Where else do you perform?

I founded Kantos back in 2015 when I graduated from the University of Manchester and I wanted to carry on conducting chamber choir repertoire along with my peers from University who wanted to continue singing that repertoire too. Since then, it’s grown to the fore of the choral scene in the North and is now a professional ensemble performing a full season of events each year, plus recordings and many other projects too. We perform everywhere from concert halls to nightclubs to empty swimming baths and we absolutely love taking our programmes to all these different spaces to meet different audiences and to tell stories and share emotions using choral music!

If you had three words to describe what you’d like audiences to take away from this concert, what would they be?

Groove

Laughter

A bounce in their step (sorry, that’s more than one word!)

Find out more and get your tickets for Let’s Dance! here.