Music for a Winter's Night

Charpentier to Poulenc

Tuesday 12 February 2008 at 7.30 pm

St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, London, EC2V 6AU

£10 (full price), £8 (concessions)

See the flyer / See the programme

The first half of the programme, with chamber organ continuo, is rooted in the French Baroque. Its centrepiece is Marc-Antoine Charpentier's stunning Messe des morts à quatre voix [ Requiem for Four Voices ] of c.1688. This is prefaced by Jean-Philippe Rameau's Laboravi Clamans [ I am Weary with Crying Out ] of 1722, a five-part vocal fugue based on the fourth verse of Psalm 68.

The second half of the concert features unaccompanied chansons, madrigals and part-songs with a nocturnal theme. In two contrasting depictions of a winter's night, Roland de Lassus's La nuit froide et sombre [ The Cold and Dark Night ] of 1576 is set against Francis Poulenc's Un soir de neige [ A Snowy Evening ] written over Christmas 1944.

John Wilbye's lyrical five-part madrigal Draw on Sweet Night (1609), which invokes the onset of darkness as an escape from daytime woes, contrasts with John Rutter's modern interpretation of the same text (1995). And Benjamin Britten's atmospheric part-song The Evening Primrose (no.4 of Britten's Five Flower Songs op.47 of 1950) is followed by Edward Elgar's beautiful setting of Tennyson's poem There is sweet music (from Four Unaccompanied part-songs Op.53 of 1907) - the "music that brings sweet sleep". The concert concludes with a selection of Poulenc's Chansons françaises of 1945

Chamber Organ: Stephen Farr

Conductor: Madeleine Lovell