A Londinium Bestiary

St John's Waterloo, London
A Londinium Bestiary image
Ad
Event has ended
This event ended on Friday 5th of October 2018
Admission
£12 (adv. discount) / £15 | £10 (student concession)
Location

St John's Waterloo, London

Nearest Tube/Rail Stations
Waterloo 0.17 miles

To open its 2018-9 season London chamber choir Londinium presents a thrilling programme of works on the theme of weird and wonderful creatures. Kenneth Leighton's unpublished 'Laudes Animantium' ('Praises of the Creatures') is a superb sequence of poems about animals, from Blake's Lamb and Tyger to Tennyson's Kraken, by way of Edward Lear and others, and finds its composer at the height of his powers. Ola Gjeilo's 'Unicornis Captivatur', based on remarkable fifteenth-century chants, introduces us to the unicorn, pelican, phoenix, hydra and crocodile. Finally, Bernard Hughes' 2011 'A Medieval Bestiary' explores the relationship between medieval man and the animal world. The dramatis personae, taken from a thirteenth-century source, include the manticore, parander, gryphon, monoceros, dragon, panther, and scorpion, and Hughes' music is no less inventive and exhilarating.

Londinium, directed by Andrew Griffiths, is one of London's most versatile chamber choirs, particularly noted for vibrant performances of a cappella repertoire. The choir's recently released CD of 20th-century British choral music, 'The Gluepot Connection' (SOMM Recordings 2018) has been praised by Gramophone (“impressive accomplishment and no mean flair… superbly controlled advocacy”) and on BBC Radio 3 and France Musique; it has also received a 5* review from Choir & Organ and 4* reviews in BBC Music Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, and the Birmingham Post, and was a MusicWeb International Recording of the Month for April 2018.

Tags: Music

User Reviews

There are no user reviews