(Preview) Londinium: London to Edinburgh

Stockbridge Church - 11/06/23, 3pm

This concert is part of a tour by the London-based chamber choir, Londinium, and promises to be a fascinating mixture of new and old. Celebrating the music of Kenneth Leighton, for many years Professor of Music at Edinburgh University, the choir will also sing pieces by James MacMillan and Ralph Vaughan Williams and will commemorate the 400th anniversary of the deaths of Byrd and Weelkes.

Leighton studied with Vaughan Williams (and Finzi), and taught MacMillan, as well as Sir Donald Runnicles, at Edinburgh, and Londinium has just released a new CD of his choral music, ‘Every Living Creature’, which will be available to buy at the concert.

The choir, under its Musical Director Andrew Griffiths, has established a fine reputation for adventurous programming of 20th and 21st century music. Founded in 2005, the choir is made up of top London choral singers, and this concert is one not to miss. Starting with Leighton’s ‘London Town’ (1968), the concert will explore MacMillan’s ‘The Gallant Weaver’ (text by Burns) and ‘Who shall separate us?’ (written for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth), Vaughan Williams’ choral setting of Burns’ ‘Ca’ the Yowes’, and contrasting motets by William Byrd and Thomas Weelkes, masters of Elizabethan polyphony. Londinium closes its concert with Kenneth Leighton’s rousing ‘Hymn to the Trinity’, written in 1973 in Edinburgh.