From Palm Sunday to Holy Saturday, St John’s Smith Square will host workshops, lunchtime concerts, evening concerts and late-night liturgical events, exploring a vast range of sacred music for Holy Week. In addition to the concerts, Nigel Short and Tenebrae Consort will perform a range of devotional Tenebrae settings and responses on Spy Wednesday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
The festival will also include opportunities to participate in a workshop with Tenebrae, and Come & Sing Handel’s Messiah with the Smith Square Voices.
“As both a consecrated church and leading performance venue, St John’s Smith Square is the perfect setting for this series and we are delighted to welcome a host of distinguished performers for the inaugural Festival.
The week begins with the BBC Singers who will explore a selection of choral music for Palm Sunday, followed by The Hanover Band and Chorus who will be performing Rossini’s dramatic Stabat Mater. VOCES8 will take to the stage alongside Jonathan Dove and Les Inventions with a programme which will culminate in Dove’s song cycle for double chorus, The Passing of the Year.
Tenebrae and the Aurora Orchestra will perform Fauré’s Requiem set by candlelight and the choir, alongside violin soloist Max Baillie, will make use of the whole building in order to create an immersive audience experience. Alamire treat us to a programme centred around the ever-evolving church music of Thomas Tallis, who famously led England’s musical reformation in the mid-16th century, which features the modern-day premiere of Tallis’ See, Lord, and behold (text by Queen Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and last Queen) which has not been performed for 450 years.
Of course, no Holy Week Festival would be complete without a Bach Passion, and on Good Friday Polyphony and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment will return for their popular annual performance of the St John Passion under the direction of Stephen Layton.”
Nigel Short
Artistic Director, Tenebrae