SALISBURY Cathedral Choir is showcasing a selection of music that will be performed during their upcoming tour to the west coast of America.

The Choral Foundation pre-tour concert on Sunday (February 26), 3pm, in the cathedral, includes popular choral classics such as J S Bach’s Ich lasse dich nicht and Komm Jesu, komm, Mozart’s Ave verum corpus, Purcell’s Hear my prayer and Gregorio’s Allegri Miserere.

There will also be two organ solos - William Byrd’s Fantasia and William Harris’ Flourish for an Occasion - performed by organ scholar Claudia Grinnell, and Ian Wicks, the director of music at the Cathedral School and acting assistant director of music at the cathedral.

Director of music David Halls said: “The music in our Pre-Tour Concert may be familiar but that doesn’t make it any less challenging. Allegri Miserere is famous for the high C, sung not just once but many times in the course of the piece. Fortunately the choir are in very good voice at the moment. The boys and girls have done so much singing over Christmas and Epiphany that they are match fit and all that rehearsing and accumulation of experience has begun to pay off.”

No tickets are required but there is a retiring collection. All proceeds will go towards the Choral Foundation, which provides bursaries for talented children who might not otherwise have been given the opportunity to become a Cathedral chorister.

The choir will be on tour in the US from March 15 to 27. One of the key stops will be Stanford University, where choristers will take part in a ‘concert with commentary’ featuring Salisbury’s Sarum Rite, the formal liturgy developed in Salisbury after the Norman Conquest in 1066 and used throughout Britain and parts of northern and western Europe for hundreds of years until the Reformation. The Sarum Rite has formed the basis of ground-breaking academic research at the university.

The full itinerary includes a mixture of concerts, services, workshops in Stanford, San Francisco, Saratoga, Carmel, Sunnyvale and Belvedere. There will also be educational visits for the choristers including a trip to the Golden Gate Bridge, the Monterey Aquarium and the Science Museum in San Francisco.

Mr Hall said: “This US tour will be a great experience for the choristers. Many of them will have toured Europe before but America is a very different beast.

"For one thing, we’ll be going to the West Coast, which is a long way from home and culturally very different. They’ll be singing a mixture of services and concerts and performing some of the best know and best loved works from the choral repertoire.”