Autumn news

Epiphoni Newsletter to friends

 

Dear Friends and Benefactors,

 

It is now 6 months since we launched the Epiphoni’s Friends Scheme at our Fifth Birthday Concert in April and in that time we have continued to delight our audiences across London.

Later in April, we gave our annual Good Friday concert and then in May, in the closing concert of the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music, we had the great privilege of performing a programme of Jonathan Dove’s music in honour of his 60th birthday with the composer present. An eclectic programme included settings of texts by Shakespeare, Tennyson, Dickinson and Hardy.

Our weekend residency at St Paul’s Cathedral in mid-August further honoured Jonathan Dove with a performance of his Missa Brevis at Eucharist, alongside the evergreen Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence by Bairstow, which sounded magnificent in an acoustic that allowed us to wallow luxuriously in the echoes during the pauses.

 

Other outings over the summer included a wedding alongside the London Mozart Players, some members bolstering the forces of the BBC Symphony Chorus in Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony at the Proms and a very small recording project for Jamie Cumming-Wesley. Jamie Cumming-Wesley is a budding contemporary composer and we came together to create a demo recording of his setting of the Nunc Dimittis. An enjoyable evening spent singing, and useful practice in front of microphones for the upcoming recording project. You can find the recording on Spotify.

 

At the time of writing, Epiphoni is deep into a recording project of young composer, Owain Park’s secular works. We are partnering again with the fantastic Delphian Records label, with whom we recorded our disc of David Bednall’s choral works in 2016. The majority of the music that we are singing in this project has not been recorded before and some of it is particularly hot of the press – Owain has just passed us the final movement of one set with two weeks to go! We recently spent a weekend away near Oxford for an intensive period of rehearsals and coaching which are all putting us on a trajectory towards another excellent recording to show off the extraordinary talent we have in the team.

If you would like to pledge your support to the recording project in particular, secure yourselves a signed CD or a ticket to the launch concert, or know someone who would, you should check out our crowdfunder at https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/epiphoni-recording-owain-park.

 

The Christmas season is looking likely to be as busy as ever, with a wedding, charity concert and more carol singing than you can shake a stocking at. The main event of the programme will be the Epiphoni Christmas concert and we will be bringing you a tonne of our favourites, performed to perfection of course. The concert will be at St George’s, Bloomsbury on 20^th December (don’t forget to claim your Friendship ticket if you haven’t already!).

We cannot wait to welcome you to share Christmas with Epiphoni.

 

Looking further ahead, we have some exciting concerts in the pipeline.

Rachmaninov’s Vespers in Canterbury Cathedral, collaborating with the Canterbury Choral Society, is first up in 2020. It is one of the all time favourites of many of the choir members and will heavily feature our specialist purveyors of low notes. An exciting out-of-London treat!

We follow this with a performance on 28^th March of Pizzetti’s “Murder in the Cathedral” at the QEH Southbank with Martyn Brabbins and the City of London Sinfonia, featuring Sir John Tomlinson. Another interesting project for the choir to get their teeth into, and certainly a work that they won’t get to perform very often!

We launch the recording of Owain Park’s work on 2^nd July with a concert of music by composers associated with Trinity College Cambridge. This will be part of the Re:sound series of concerts at the Voces8 centre. It will be a celebration of over a year’s work on planning, preparing and producing the recording and we look forward to welcoming you.

Thank you once again for your ongoing support of the Epiphoni Consort. Everything that we do would not be possible without the support that we have so gratefully received from our Friends and Benefactors. We will continue to do what we do best and we can’t wait to welcome you to a concert soon!

With best wishes,

 

Epiphoni