The Seven Deadly Sins: Sloth
Tuesday 11 May 2010 at 7.30pm
St Botolph without Bishopsgate, London, EC2M 3TL
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Languid melodies, sonorous harmonies and serene stillness characterize the Music of Indolence in Londinium's expressive vocal rendition of the Sin of Sloth.
Parry's extraordinary late Songs of Farewell are at the centre of a concert for meditative reflection, in which Sloth is both heavy sleep - with its intimations of death - and the stillness of inactivity.
Winding its way from Tudor England (John Dowland) to contemporary America (Eric Whitacre), this beautiful programme of unaccompanied choral music also features reflective part-songs by Elgar, Stanford and John Ireland, Delius's wordless song To be Sung of a Summer Night on the Water, and the shimmering stillness of Saint-Saens's Calme des nuits.
Sleep and death intertwine in the first half of the concert. In Dowland's late Renaissance madrigal Come Heavy Sleep, sleep is explicitly 'the image of true death'. Similarly, Parry's monumental motet series Songs of Farewell, completed shortly before the composer's own death in 1918, meditates introspectively on the eternity of man's final sleep. Londinium performs the last four motets in the series: Never, Weather-beaten Sail; There is an Old Belief; At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners; and Lord, Let me Know Mine End.
While John Ireland's Immortality (1942) continues the meditation on the eternal, Stanford's beautiful part-song The Blue Bird (1911) focuses on an exquisite single moment of stillness, which is temporarily interrupted by the soaring movement of the bird above the water.
Night-time emerges in the second half of the concert as the setting for the music of Sloth: a time for inactivity and reflection. In Elgar's Weary Wind of the West (1902), the wind draws encroaching night across the waves to the shore, and with the onset of night comes a final, haunting stillness. Two further part-songs by Elgar (Evening Scene, 1905 and The Prince of Sleep, 1925) contemplate the mysterious peacefulness of the twilight hour.
The vastness of night is expressed in Saint-Saens's magical Calme des nuits (1880s) and Delius's wordless two-part chorus To be sung of a summer night on the water (1917), both expansive in their sense of stillness. Also celebrating the poetry of the night is Morten Laurisden's Soneto de la Noche (2005), based on a poem by Pablo Neruda, which is serene in its folk-like simplicity. And so to Eric Whitacre's sonorous Sleep - where 'dreams may come both dark and deep'.
Musical Director: Madeleine Lovell
Londinium reserves the right to change the programme and performers without notice.