Heroines – 24 November 2018, 7:30pm

On Saturday, 24 November, Whitehall Choir will present a concert at St Peter’s Eaton Square SW1W 9AL, jointly with the Austrian choir Cantus Novus Wien.

In the first part of this concert, Whitehall Choir will present pieces exclusively by women: the 12th-century German Benedictine abbess and visionary Hildegard von Bingen, the Venetian Baroque composer Barbara Strozzi and Fanny Mendelssohn from the Romantic period. We shall also be singing works by 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 Master of the Queen’s Music, Judith Weir.

The choir is delighted to be joined by Cantus Novus Wien with whom we performed on tour in Vienna in 2016. Cantus Novus will be singing music from not only the German and Austrian canon – Brahms, Alma Mahler and Berta Aichinger plus a world première by Annamaria Kowalsky – but also English and Welsh: Paul Mealor (Locus iste) and Paul Spicer’s heart-wrenching setting of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet ‘How do I love thee?’. The two groups will also form a combined choir in Roxanna Panufnik’s Westminster Mass, and finally in Balfour Gardiner’s Evening Hymn and Paul Spicer’s ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’, which we enjoyed performing jointly at our last meeting. It is a very special collaboration by two choirs.

The year 2018 marks the centenary of women’s suffrage both in Austria and the UK.  We look forward to exploring such beautiful and thrilling music in a programme with so many women composers. This music is too rarely performed and we are especially excited to be including a première performance.

Tickets

Tickets are available from Eventbrite

Venue

St Peter’s is on Eaton Square in Belgravia, a short walk from Victoria Station. The Church was originally built between 1824 and 1827, and then was rebuilt to the same design after being burnt down. It was again rebuilt after a second fire in 1990, and was then described by the Times in 1991 as “one of the most beautiful churches in London”.

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