Time and tide wait for Londinium in Hastings and Bexhill this weekend

August 23, 2019

Acclaimed London chamber choir Londinium will perform two concerts – one in Hastings, the other in Bexhill – over this Bank Holiday weekend celebrating the myths of the sea and the passage of time

For Londinium, whose CD of 20th-century British choral music has received widespread critical praise, this will be a 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 at Christ Church, St Leonards-on-Sea, tomorrow (August 24th) and at St Augustine’s, Bexhill-on-Sea, on Sunday (August 25th), 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.

LONDINIUMPhoto © Sheila Burnett
July 2017 — Londinium

The two concerts will include music by Thomas 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 premie?red in an appearance on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune earlier this summer.

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 four star reviews in The Daily Telegraph and BBC Music Magazine, and was a MusicWeb International Recording of the Year for 2018.

Andrew Griffiths, Musical Director of Londinium, has an enviable reputation as a talented and versatile conductor with a particular flair for opera and choral music.

A graduate of the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Young Artist Programme, he has conducted for companies including The Royal Opera, Welsh National Opera, Opera North, Early Opera Company and Bampton Classical Opera, and has appeared in concert with Southbank Sinfonia and the Orpheus Sinfonia. He frequently broadcasts with the BBC Singers and regularly directs the choirs at Dartington International Summer School.

He is also active as an accompanist, vocal coach, re?pe?titeur and continuo player, and sings as a founder member of the Gramophone Award-winning vocal consort Stile Antico.

www.londinium-voices.org.uk