The Elysian Singers - 1943: Visions of Liberty

Event information

2013 is a year of many notable musical anniversaries, including two of the greatest choral composers of the 20th century: Benjamin Britten and Francis Poulenc. The Elysian Singers will be marking Britten's centenary in November 2013 with a birthday concert in St John's Smith Square in November 2013, so our first concert of the year is more particularly a tribute to Poulenc, the many-sided French genius appreciated as much this side of the Channel as in his home country. Amongst his extensive choral output towers his wartime masterpiece, 'Figure Humaine', a setting of resistance poetry composed in 1943 and later premiered by the BBC Singers in a radio broadcast.

And it is fascinating to discover how many other great choral works were composed in the same year. In England, Britten was completing his festival cantata 'Rejoice in the Lamb' to remarkable and colourful words written by the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart while confined to an asylum. Tippett produced his wonderful anthem 'Plebs Angelica', and Herbert Howells was contemplating what became a long and fruitful relationship with Anglican music, with his Te Deum composed for King's College Cambridge. The list is completed by the little-known but highly expressive 'Tre Composizioni Corali' by the Italian choral specialist Ildebrando Pizzetti. All in all, 1943 was truly a remarkable year, in which some of the 20th-century's greatest choral music came into being.

£1 tickets for children available on the door or from choir members.