Central London’s largest nightclub will be home to an atmospheric programme of music for choir and cello this Halloween
Central London’s largest nightclub, Heaven, will be home to an atmospheric programme of music for choir and cello this Halloween, performed by The Fourth Choir, London’s critically-acclaimed LGBTQ+ classical chamber choir, and leading cello soloist Katherine Jenkinson.
The Gloaming: Between Worlds, conducted by Jamie Powe, promises to be an immersive audience experience of works for a cappella choir and cello drawing on many facets of the Autumn festival: sacred and profane, eerie and elemental, and featuring works from the medieval era to contemporary masterpieces.
Works for choir include the primal Air and Fire from Canadian composer Katerina Gimon’s Elements series as well as a trio of ghostly folk-influenced numbers from British composers working around the turn of the 20th century: Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Coleridge-Taylor. The first half of the concert concludes with Irish contemporary composer Rhona Clarke’s setting of a macabre and chilling nursery rhyme.
The iconically ominous Dies Irae from the Requiem mass, which has served as inspiration for dozens of horror movie soundtracks such as The Shining, will also be woven throughout the evening.
The performance features the UK première of celebrated Polish composer Paweł Łukaszewski’s dramatic and otherworldly Seven Last Words of Christ: an extended work for double choir and cello.
The concert makes further use of the charged pairing of voice and cello with John Taverner’s ethereal Svyati, drawing on call and response between the choir and instrument from Russian Orthodox funereal tradition, and, closer to home, Alexander Campkin’s The Ghost of Shadwell Stair. Campkin’s piece was premièred by the choir in 2017 and sets a text by the war poet Wilfred Owen that evokes the queer nightlife of early 20th century London “haunting” the wharves, shores and arches by the Thames: a fitting subject matter for Heaven’s industrial brick arches.
