About this Event
In Sing to the Moon, William Byrd's Mass for Four Voices will be interwoven throughout a programme of music which explores light, darkness, endings and new beginnings.
The evening will open with William Harris’s Bring Us O Lord, a beautiful setting for double choir of words by John Donne. The programme will also include Herbert Howells' Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing, an epic and profound piece originally written for a memorial service to John F. Kennedy.
The choir will also sing Stephanie Martin’s A Frost Sequence. Written during the Covid lockdowns in 2020, the trilogy is a setting of three Robert Frost poems which reflect on the ephemeral nature of existence and on time. As Martin writes in her introduction to the music: ‘An over-arching theme is time: time that decays all that is precious, time that we cannot recover or re-live, and time that passes too quickly, even as we recognise the fleeting beauty surrounding us’.
The beauty of the natural world and the concept of home will be explored further in Caroline Shaw’s And the Swallow and in Lucy Walker’s Give Me Your Stars. To close, the choir will sing Laura Mvula’s Sing to the Moon, which was recorded in 2020 by the chapel choir of Pembroke College, conducted by Anna Lapwood.
This concert is dedicated to the memory of the choir's co-founder and long-term bass, Chris Hanson-Abbott, as well as to the memory of Phil Rowlands, stalwart Vivamus tenor, librarian and friend.
Event venue & nearby stays
St Clement Danes, Strand, London, United Kingdom
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