- The Seven Deadly Sins: Wrath & Pride
- Tuesday 23 February at 7.30pm
- St Botolph without Bishopsgate, London, EC2M 3TL
- Nearest Stations: Liverpool Street (Central, Circle, Metropolitan, Hammersmith & City, District, National Rail), Bank (Central, Northern Lines)
- Download the flyer / List of works / See the programme
- Londinium explores the twin passions of Wrath and Pride in a concert ringing with the sounds of battle and bravado. Experience the drama of the Renaissance battlefield in Janequin's exhilarating chanson La Guerre, the rousing expression of late 19th-century patriotism in Charles Stanford's choral narrative The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet, and the proud invocation of the British Empire in songs by Elgar and his contemporaries. And in the battle of the sexes, hear the anger of spurned love expressed in Lassus's fantastically brutal madrigal Chi chi li chi and the deadpan narration of Cole Porter's macabre song Miss Otis Regrets.
- The music of Wrath is introduced with a series of sixteenth-century French and Italian depictions of battles political and personal, in a-cappella works by Guillaume Costeley, Clément Janequin, Roland de Lassus, Andrea Gabrieli and Giovanni Gastoldi. The centre-piece of the concert's first half is Janequin's extended dramatic chanson La Guerre: La Bataille de Marignan for unaccompanied voices in four parts, in which percussive vocal effects mimic the cannons, drums and battle-cries of war. In Lassus's Italian madrigal Chi chi li chi, by contrast, the anger is small-scale: the feud of former lovers full of recriminations and disdain.
- We are back at war in the second half of the concert as the plucky English go into battle against the 'devildoms of Spain' in Charles Stanford's 1886 setting of Tennyson's poem The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet: an epic tale of English valour set for four-part chorus and orchestra (performed by Londinium in a version for organ accompaniment). The Pride of Empire is expressed in a series of short pieces by early twentieth-century British composers glorifying war in the cause of King and country: Eaton Faning's The Crown of Empire (1916), the four-part song The King (1919) by Herbert Brewer, and Elgar's part-song The Reveille (1907).
- But the concert ends on a lighter and strictly personal note with those disappointed, warring lovers: the breezy Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby and the devastating Miss Otis.
- Musical Director: Madeleine Lovell
Londinium reserves the right to change the programme and performers without notice.