The Elements: Songs of the Earth, the Air, Fire and Water

The expressive power of the four classical elements – Earth, Air, Fire and Water – is explored in Londinium’s imaginative concert of contrasting motets and part-songs, by Victoria, Mendelssohn, Howells, Tippett, Lauridsen and others. Earth is the stony ground of burial, the dust of decay, in the spare melodic lines of Howells’ sombre motet Take him, Earth, for Cherishing; Air is the clear, bright sound of the trumpet in Tippett’s exuberant Dance, Clarion Air; Fire is the tempestuousness of human passion in Lauridsen’s extraordinary and rarely performed Madrigali: Six Fire Songs on Italian Renaissance Poems; and Water is by turns mellifluous (Victoria’s Super flumina babylonis), sonorous (Eric Whitacre’s Water Night) and serene (Stanford’s The Blue Bird, reinterpreted in Judith Bingham’s The Drowned Lovers). The place of the elements in nature is celebrated in Mendelssohn’s exquisite series of part-songs Lieder im Freien zu singen, a charming homage to spring and the beauty of the natural world.