Welcome Spring with The Icelandic Choir of London and Slavic Voices

Event information

Songs from thousands of miles away will be brought to your doorstep by two British choirs - The Icelandic Choir of London and Slavic Voices (Brighton and London). Experience compelling and complex repertoire from several musical cultures and styles to welcome this year’s sunshine.

The Icelandic Choir of London (Íslenski Kórinn í London), founded in 1984, performs a varied Nordic programme and travels regularly. The group’s main focus is to perform Icelandic choral music but it also performs folk music, pop music arrangements and other Nordic choral repertoire. The choir has travelled to and performed in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and The Netherlands, as well as London, Manchester, Brighton and Hull. Collaborators include the Reykjavik Chamber Choir, London Nordic Choir, the German Choir of London, Cecil Sharp House Choir, Southbank Centre London, other Icelandic choirs from across Northern Europe and many more. Since 2012 the choir has been directed by Helgi R. Ingvarsson, Icelandic-British composer, teacher and lecturer.

Slavic Voices London & Brighton choir perform in a way that is rarely encountered in the choral world. There is freedom and spontaneity in their approach to folklore as well as precision and deep focus in their classical repertoire, presented with great attention to cultural context, history and style. The choir presents music of all styles from the Slavic world: Orthodox chants, beautiful classics by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and others, refined XVIII-XIX-centuries Art songs and gritty folklore from the far corners of Siberia to the banks of the Black Sea. The repertoire is sung mainly in Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Belorussian, sometimes even Georgian or Romanian. The choir is led by Polina Skovoroda-Shepherd, granddaughter of a Cossack, an internationally acclaimed performer, educator and cultural activist. It was founded in September 2023 and now has around 90 singers with all kinds of backgrounds. SV have performed joint concerts with a Macedonian Folk Duo Filip Arilon and Stojan Stojanov (Macedonia), Maspindzeli Georgian choir (London), Heartwood Chorus in Bristol, Bulgarian dance group Vezanitsa (Brighton) and even collaborated with Buffo’s Wake - a UK Klezmer-Punk Carnival Chaos Band.