Heroines - 900 Years of Women in Song

In the first part of this concert, presented at the end of the year marking the centenary of women's suffrage in both the UK and Austria, Whitehall Choir will present beautiful and thrilling music by women, some of which is rarely performed and has never been recorded. Covering 900 years, it begins with the 12th-century German Benedictine abbess and visionary Hildegard von Bingen, with the journey continuing through the Venetian Baroque composer Barbara Strozzi and the Romantic composer Fanny Mendelssohn. Also featured are two women who died tragically young 100 years ago – Lili Boulanger and Morfydd Owen – as well as pieces by the mid-20th-century British composer Elizabeth Poston and the present-day Master of the Queen's Music, Judith Weir. In 2016 the choir enjoyed a highly successful tour to Vienna and performed alongside Cantus Novus Wien. We are delighted to welcome them to London to sing wonderful sacred music from the German and Austrian canon: Bruckner, Brahms, Alma Mahler and Berta Aichinger. Finally, the two groups will form a combined choir in Roxanna Panufnik's atmospheric Westminster Mass and Paul Spicer's 'Glory be to God for dappled things: a welcome repeat of the piece we sang together two years ago.