London Song Festival

I posted about this before, when we were privileged to have a preview of the festival, but now the real event is getting closer. The London Song Festival is a series of song recitals, at St. George's Church, Hanover Square on Thursday evenings, organised by artistic director Nigel Foster.

The theme of this year's series is English Song performed by a mixture of established and up and coming young British singers. Roderick Williams will be performing Finzi, Holst, Butterworth, Gurney and Bax settings of Hardy and Housman.  Louise Winter's recital is centred on the poetry of two Victorian women, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge; they share a centenary this year as Browning died in 1861, the year Coleridge was born. In an interesting programme there will be songs by Dominic Argento, Elgar, Bridge, Quilter, Parry and Ireland.

Other recitals give us Quilter, Britten, Warlock, Walton, Delius, Stanford and Betty Roe setting classic English Romantic Poets, or 20th century English composers setting Jacobean poets, a combination that seems to have been highly popular.

For the final recital on Wednesday 30th November, David Stout and Laura Casey will be singing comedy songs by Flanders and Swann, Coward, Jeremy Nicholas, Betty Roe and John Dankworth.

My only complaint is that there doesn't seem to be anything by Madeleine Dring (Robert Tear's recording of the Song of the Nightclub Proprietress remains an all time favorite), but you can't fit everything in can you!.