Judith Bingham
Unpredictable but Providential
Edward Cowie
Lyrebirds – Dusk – Nocturne
Judith Weir
Madrigal
John Rutter
I my Best-Beloved’s am
Lucy Walker
There Will Be Stars
Benjamin Britten
A Shepherd’s Carol
Ben Nobuto
BLIP
Xia Leon Sloane
Losing the Lark
BBC commission: world premiere
John Pickard
Mass in Troubled Times
John Tavener
Song for Athene
BBC Singers
Sofi Jeannin
conductor
Reviewed by:
Reviewed: 25 July, 2024
Venue: Bristol Beacon
Over its 100-year history the BBC Singers – Britain’s only full-time professional chamber choir – has performed a vast array of repertoire, in concert and over the airwaves, giving the premieres of countless works. Under Chief Conductor Sofi Jeannin, today’s virtuosic line-up revives some of these milestones. Song for Athene was written after John Tavener attended the funeral of Athene Hariades, the daughter of a family friend; the piece won a huge international audience when performed at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. Britten’s A Shepherd’s Carol is a setting of W. H. Auden, first heard in a 1944 BBC radio programme of new poetry written specially for Christmas Eve. Premiered in 2018, John Pickard’s Mass in Troubled Times interweaves words from the Latin Mass with texts from four other languages to piece together the story of a refugee father and daughter fleeing their war-torn country by sea.
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