Pergolesi Stabat Mater and music for Advent & Christmas

The SPAB London Group
CHRISTMAS CONCERT

Lucy Thomas - soprano
Glenn Kesby - counter tenor
Katie De La Matter - chamber organ

The first half of the evening’s programme will feature a musical setting of the Stabat Mater composed by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi in the final weeks of his life in 1736. The Stabat Mater is a 13th century hymn to Mary, which portrays her suffering as the mother of Jesus during his crucifixion. The Christmas Cantatas featured in the second half of the concert by Johann Hermann Schein and Heinrich Schütz date from the early 1600s and those of Handel and Bach from the mid-1700s are wonderfully appropriate pieces to be performed at Christmas in the German Lutheran Church.

The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) is the world’s oldest pressure group fighting to save historic buildings from decay, demolition and damage. Founded in 1877 by William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and the architect Philip Webb with other leading members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood the SPAB became the world’s first conservation body. Today the SPAB advise, educate and campaign to save historic buildings.

St George’s German Lutheran Church was founded by Dederich Beckmann in 1762 for the immigrant German sugar refiners in London’s East End. The Congregational Chapel retains many of its original features, such as its box pews, a double height central pulpit, and the coat-of-arms for King George III. The church was repaired in 2004 by the Historic Chapels Trust who now have their headquarters in the church.