A Londinium Bestiary

The Medieval world was fascinated by mythical and semi-mythical beasts, using their behaviour as exemplars in moral and religious teaching. These stories also provide a wonderful fund of inventive texts for setting. The choir Londinium, conductor Andrew Griffiths, will be exploring these worlds with their A Londinium Bestiary at St John’s Waterloo church, Waterloo Road, London, SE1 8TY on Friday 5 October 2018. The choir will be performing three works, Kenneth Leighton’s Laudes Animantium op.61, Bernard Hughes’ A Medieval Bestiary and Ola Gjeilo's Unicornis Captivatur.

Kenneth Leighton’s unpublished Laudes Animantium op.61 was composed in 1970-71 and sets a sequence of poems about animals, from Blake's Lamb and Tyger to Tennyson's Kraken, by way of Edward Lear. Bernard Hughes’ A Medieval Bestiary (2011) was commissioned by the BBC Singers and sets texts from a thirteenth-century bestiary interspersed with three Anglo-Saxon animal allegories to explore the relationship between medieval man and the animal world. Ola Gjeilo’s Unicornis Captivatur was written in 2001. The text from the Engelberg Codex, introduces us to the unicorn, pelican, phoenix, hydra and crocodile

Full details from the Londinium website.