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Details
Heaven
Villiers St
Charing Cross
London
WC2N 6NG
England
Tickets
Prices: £20, £12.50 concessions
Book Tickets
Programme
Katerina Gimon – Air
Katerina Gimon – Fire
Edward Elgar – Owls (an epitaph), Op.53 no.4
Ralph Vaughan Williams – The Lover's Ghost
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor – Sea Drift, Op.69
Alexander Campkin – The Ghost of Shadwell Stair
Rhona Clarke – The Old Woman
Pawel Lukaszewski – Seven Last Words of Christ
John Tavener – Svyati
Michael John Trotta – Requiem: Dies Irae
Performers
Jamie Powe – Conductor
Katherine Jenkinson – Violoncello
Programme Note
Central London’s largest nightclub, Heaven, will be home to an atmospheric programme of music for choir and cello this Halloween, performed by The Fourth Choir, London’s critically-acclaimed LGBTQ+ classical chamber choir, and leading cello soloist Katherine Jenkinson.
The Gloaming: Between Worlds, conducted by Jamie Powe, promises to be an evocative audience experience through works for a cappella choir and cello drawing on many facets of the Autumn festival. Sacred and profane, eerie and elemental, liminal and transporting—and featuring works from the medieval era to contemporary masterpieces.
A cappella choral works include the primal Air and Fire from Canadian composer Katerina Gimon’s Elements series as well as a trio of ghostly folk-influenced numbers from British composers working around the turn of the 20th century: Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Coleridge-Taylor. The first half of the concert concludes with Irish contemporary composer Rhona Clarke’s setting of a macabre and chilling nursery rhyme.
In the second half of the concert, the mood changes from pagan Halloween to sacred All Hallow’s Eve, the Eve of All Saints Day, and from ethereality to spirituality.
The main work of this half will be the UK première of celebrated Polish composer Paweł Łukaszewski’s dramatic and otherworldly Seven Last Words of Christ, an extended work for double choir and cello.
The concert makes further use of the charged pairing of voice and cello with John Taverner’s ethereal Svyati, drawing on call and response between choir and instrument from Russian Orthodox funereal tradition, and, closer to home, Alexander Campkin’s The Ghost of Shadwell Stair. Campkin’s piece was premièred by the Choir in 2017 and sets a text by the war poet Wilfred Owen that was never published in his lifetime as it evokes the queer nightlife of early 20th century London “haunting” the wharves, shores and arches by the Thames: a fitting subject matter for Heaven’s industrial brick arches.
The iconically ominous Dies Irae from the Requiem mass, which has served as inspiration for dozens of horror movie soundtracks such as The Shining, will also be woven throughout the evening
