Londinium recording their well received CD ‘ The Gluepot Connection’ (photo by Sheila Burnett).

Londinium brings a cappella music to Hastings and Bexhill over bank holiday weekend

Critically acclaimed London chamber choir Londinium is visiting Hastings and Bexhill on the August bank holiday weekend with a programme celebrating the myths of the sea and the passage of time, as they explain.

London chamber choir Londinium, whose CD of 20th-century British choral music has received widespread critical praise, will perform concerts in Hastings and Bexhill over the August bank holiday weekend on the choir’s first tour to the south coast, introducing new audiences to its imaginative programmes of wide-ranging a cappella repertoire, from the Renaissance to the contemporary.

Londinium’s concert programme Time and Tide, conducted by the choir’s musical director Andrew Griffiths, plots an inventive voyage through music related to the rhythms of the sea and the passage of time, encompassing myths and legends, songs and shanties, ticking clocks and timeless landscapes. The concert’s twin themes converge in words from The Tempest, as set in Vaughan Williams’ stunning Shakespeare Songs.

The two concerts will include music by Edmund Campion, Andrea Gabrieli, Johannes Brahms, Charles Stanford, Edvard Grieg, Josef Rheinberger, John Ireland, Gustav Holst and Bob Chilcott, as well as Andrew Griffiths’ own arrangement for a cappella choir of Henry Purcell’s aria Fairest Isle, which the choir premièred in an appearance on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune on 11 July.

Photo by Sheila Burnett.

Londinium’s critically acclaimed CD of 20th-century British choral music, The Gluepot Connection, takes as its starting-point a former London pub, The George on Great Portland Street near the BBC (nicknamed ‘The Gluepot’ by Sir Henry Wood), bringing together a selection of music by the eclectic group of composers who gathered there during the first half of the 20th century.

The CD has been praised on BBC Radio 3 and France Musique, received 4* reviews in The Daily Telegraph and BBC Music Magazine, and was a MusicWeb International Recording of the Year for 2018.

Concert programme

• Charles Stanford: On Time
• Edvard Grieg: Ave Maris Stella
• Gustav Holst: Ave Maria
• Josef Rheinberger: Mass in Eb
• John Ireland: The Hills
• Bob Chilcott: Even such is time
• Stephen Chatman: Clocks
• Ralph Vaughan Williams: Three Shakespeare Songs
• Edmund Campion: Never weather-beaten sail
• Johannes Brahms: Vineta
• Andrea Gabrieli: Lasso, amor mi trasporta
• Henry Purcell arr. Andrew Griffiths: Fairest Isle
• Gustav Holst: I Love My Love
• Gustav Holst: Swansea Town

Time and Tide:, Londinium chamber choir conducted by Andrew Griffiths Saturday 24 August, 7pm, Christ Church, Silchester Rd, St Leonards-on-Sea TN37 6GL, and Sunday 25 August, 7pm, St Augustine’s Church, St Augustine’s Close, Bexhill-on-Sea TN39 3AZ. Entry free, retiring collection.

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