Glorious and good-natured music for a summer evening: acclaimed London chamber choir Voxcetera have invited the brilliant Edinburgh ensemble Rudsambee to join them for a joint concert of choral musical, ranging from Tudor anthems to the present day.
The programme includes Samuel Barber and Morten Lauridsen‘s spinetingling arrangements of Sure On This Shining Night; anthems by Biebl, Byrd, Tallis and Weelkes; settings of Shakespeare songs by Shearing; James MacMillan‘s haunting and unmistakeably celtic The Galant Weaver; and folk songs by Reger.
Two great choirs, much great music, one lovely evening.
Rudsambee Company of Singers, conductor Ciara Coleman
Voxcetera, conductor Jane Hopkins
with Adam Johnson, piano
The opening concert in our 2016-2017 season has a sombre feel, commemorating the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. Starting with The Banks of Green Willow by George Butterworth, who was killed in action on 5th August 1916, aged 31, this work is complemented by Ronald Corp’s The Somme – A Lament. The mood lifts with the choral arrangement of Serenade to Music by Butterworth’s contemporary, Vaughan Williams and the programme closes with Brahms’s glorious German Requiem.
2018 marks the centenary of the birth of composer, conductor, author, music lecturer and pianist Leonard Bernstein, whose most famous scores include West Side Story, On the Town, Candide and On the Waterfront.
Commissioned from Bernstein by the Dean of Chichester Cathedral for the 1965 Southern Cathedrals Festival, the Chichester Psalms received its UK premiere on 31st July 1965 and has gone on to become a highly popular staple of choral societies to this day. Consisting of three short movements, the Chichester Psalms is sung in Hebrew.
Our programme of 20th- and 21st-century compositions is completed with choral works by Janacek, Morten Lauridsen and Vaughan Williams.
Festival Evensong
if you can’t share no one gets any is an exhibition by Cinenova, a volunteer run feminist film and video distributor based at LUX, Waterlow Park. Cinenova has invited artist Carolyn Lazard and the worker collective Collective Text to share the space of this exhibition to present work which addresses some of the barriers to the access of film and video in its production, distribution and exhibition.
Carolyn Lazard’s video A Recipe for Disaster (2017, USA, 27 mins) uses the first programme shown with captions on US television, a cookery show, The French Chef (1972), to compose a wider study on the terms of media accessibility, and a call to produce more inclusive communities. Alongside Lazard’s video installation, Cinenova has invited Collective Text, a Glasgow-based worker collective who share skills and expertise to deliver intersectional access projects, specialising in creative Captioning and Audio Description for art and experimental film, to begin a longer-term access project with the titles within the Cinenova collection. Collective Text work in consultation with D/deaf & Hard of Hearing, Blind & Visually Impaired and Disabled artists and audiences.
Please join us for a Breakfast Opening on Wednesday 15th August at LUX, 9am–10.30am, for a special preview of the exhibition with free coffee, tea and pastries. All welcome.
A special breakfast viewing of the exhibition with artist Kathryn Elkin. Coffee, tea and pastries will be provided. All welcome, drop-in anytime between 9am-10.30am.
In this “pregnancy and baby” video—as the artist describes it—Kathryn Elkin tackles, with her usual sense of humour and irreverence, issues around motherhood, labour and creation, personal biography, being an artist and the transforming pregnant body. Queen was conceived and shot during the artist’s pregnancy and first months of parenthood.
Queen was first presented at BALTIC 39 and was produced in the context of the Warwick Stafford Fellowship. BL CK B X: Kathryn Elkin is Elkin’s first solo show in London.
Kathryn Elkin (Belfast, 1983) is an artist working with performance, video and writing. Her idiosyncratic, self-reflexive and at times hilariously absurd video works deal with roleplaying and improvising, often resembling simplified versions of music videos and TV talk shows. In her work, Elkin fuses biographical memory with shared cultural memory (popular music, television and cinema), offering a comparison of the way in which we experience art to the ways and means it is understood culturally.
Elkin is a graduate of Glasgow School of Art (2005) and Goldsmiths College (2012) and former LUX Associate Artist (2013). She is currently based in Berwick Upon Tweed.
Join us for a breakfast viewing of the Manon de Boer Three Works. Tea, coffee and pastries will be provided. All welcome drop in anytime between 9 am – 10.30 am.
LUX is proud to present a solo exhibition of Brussel based artist. De Boer 16mm works combine the rigour, self-reflexivity and minimalism of structural cinema, with the fragile, poetic and intangible. In her work, which often revolves around portraiture, de Boer explores the relationship between sound and image, personal narration and musical interpretation.
The exhibition at LUX features three films, produced over a 10 year period, in which de Boer observes the conditions for creative practice, with an emphasis on the untutored and playful creativity of children and teenagers. The central work, the new film Caco, João, Mava and Rebecca developed at the Calouste Gubelkian Museum is the second instalment of an on-going trilogy titled From nothing to something to something else which focuses on the moments when time and freedom allow for experimentation to transform into creation, giving rise to something from nothing. It is accompanied at LUX by two previous works, The Untroubled Mind and Dissonant.
Get into the Christmas spirit with an evening of sacred music, popular festive songs and traditional carols from acclaimed choir Voxcetera.
Enjoy beautiful choral works spanning 400 years, from anthems by Byrd and Praetorius to contemporary composers including John Rutter, Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen and Cecilia McDowall. And there’ll be dazzling arrangements of popular songs and carols such as Winter Wonderland, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and Ding Dong Merrily on High.
It isn’t Christmas without a Christmas concert – so why not start the season in beautiful surroundings with joyous, tranquil and uplifting music.
Voxcetera chamber choir sings Gabriel Fauré’s much-loved, moving masterpiece, with soloists Ellie and Jamie Sperling, accompanied by violin, cello, harp and organ.
The concert will also feature Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine; a selection from Gustav Holst’s Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, a collection of ancient Indian sacred texts; and Henry Balfour Gardiner’s dramatic Evening Hymn.
And you’ll hear beautiful music from contemporary composers: the hypnotic Northern Lights by Ola Gjeilo; and Paul Aryes’ sun-drenched love song Quanto sei bella.
Voxcetera is a north London-based chamber choir, directed by its founding conductor Jane Hopkins. Recent activity includes concerts at St Martin-in-the-fields, East Finchley Arts Festival, overseas tours and recording work.
Voxcetera returns to the beautiful St Michael’s Church with two dazzling works for choir and strings, written nearly 300 years apart.
Vivaldi: Gloria
In a crowded field, little beats this for exuberant Baroque joy. Yet it is full of variety, from the slow and tender “Et in terra pax” to the effervescent “Domine, Fili unigenite”, the choir accompanied throughout by sprightly strings, oboe and trumpet.
Ola Gjeilo: Sunrise Mass
“Most of my favourite composers are film composers working in America today” says the New York-based Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo, and this thrilling mass pays tribute to the emotions, adrenaline and sense of wonder of film music. Scored for choir and strings and using traditional Latin texts, the 30-minute piece is strong on melody and rich in harmony, opening with gorgeous shimmering chords that emerge magically out of silence. It’s unmistakably modern, but it’s also in touch with early sacred music including Gregorian chant.
with:
Voxcetera chamber choir
Jane Hopkins, conductor
Ellie Sperling & Bethany Partridge, soloists
String orchestra, oboe, trumpet, organ
Voxcetera is a chamber choir celebrating sacred and secular music from medieval times to the present day under the direction of its founding conductor Jane Hopkins. The choir’s achievements include its popular Christmas concerts; performances with chamber ensembles of Fauré’s Requiem, Saint-Saëns’ Requiem and Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem, at St Michael’s Highgate; tours to Germany and Ireland; performances at St Martin-in-the-Fields, St. John Smith Square, St. Stephen Walbrook and East Finchley Arts Festival; appearances at the Science Museum, British Library and the Southbank Centre; and a variety of recording work.