Saturday 16th November 2024 – St. Mary, Kippington

Organist Benjamin Frost

Our Autumn concert brought together a selection of music by contemporary composers. The programme included songs of shining nights and radiant dawns, bringing light in darkness moving through to the end of the year. We presented music by contemporary composers including Macmillan, Dove, Whitacre and Lauridsen as well as our good friends Frahm and Morgan. There were settings of verses from the Bible and a poem by Marlowe, a folk song from Renaissance Granada and Te Deum. We also paid tribute to James Whitbourn, the composer and conductor of wonderful choral pieces and an influential programme maker at the BBC, who died earlier this year and with whom our choir had a special connection at its foundation.

Our concert included some well-known pieces alongside those we hoped would become favourites – it was a compelling and refreshing programme of current composers; we see this as a key part of our repertoire alongside performances of classical and baroque pieces. We were especially delighted to be performing a world premiere of a piece written especially for us – Come Live with Me and be my Love – after Marlowe – composed by Frederick Frahm – https://frederickfrahm.com/