Spring round-up – Bernard Hughes, Voces8, KSO, Patrick Hawes and Daniel Collins

Despite a quiet January-February (the way we like it) our March and April has been one of the busiest.

On 1st March we teamed up with choir favourite Bernard Hughes to record his new piece Hear My Heart Sing – an answer to the rhetorical challenge (more a musing) of Robert Hollingworth – why isn’t there a choral “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” (the high-tempo orchestral piece by John Adams). Robert Hugill has written about this here.

Another of the pieces which has been published by Voces8 Publishing is now appearing on their site: https://voces8.com/sheet-music/night-song-by-bernard-hughes and can be heard below.

All tracks from the recording session have been added to Spotify and other streaming services.

In other composer news we’ve just found on that The Golden Carol which we commissioned from Ben Ponniah last year as part of our 10th anniversary celebrations will be published by Boosey & Hawkes later this year.

Our next project was preparing a programme to peform with Kensington Symphony Orchestra – seventh collaboration with them. The programme featured an old choir favourite, the Serenade to Music by Ralph Vaughan Williams setting a text from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Originally scored for 16 voices, each of whom has a solos, and were friends of the composer (and so marked in the score by their initials – cute) – it has become a firm favourite of the choirs over the years – this was our fifth performance – as it gives us an opportunity to showcase the many solo voices we have.

It’s also a fabulous piece and despite having performed it a number of times before this was our first with symphony orchestra and a real treat.

The sopranos and altos of the choir also sang in the final movement of Holst’s The Planets – out of sight in the balcony seats of the auditorium the sound materialised as if from nowhere, concluding the concert with a magical and ethereal atmosphere.

Our Good Friday concert took a slightly different direction on this occasion – in collaboration with St Peter’s Vauxhall, we themed it on the Book of Revelation, programming Patrick Hawes’ 7-motet (with a prologue and epilogue making it 9 movements – but the number 7 is important!) piece Revelation. We were absolutely honoured to have guest conductor Daniel Collins who is a singer with The Sixteen. The church was packed with around 100 in the audience and the combination of the Hawes Revelation music, readings from scripture and a few of our season-appropriate competition pieces made for a memorable performance!

The evening concluded with the annual tradition of a curry at Vauxhall’s finest, The Coriander. All in high spirits, two of our singers even made a rave after…

Next – Tallinn!