Summer Concert 2025

Our summer concert will include Puccini’s Missa di Gloria, Dove’s The Passing of the Year, Todd’s Jazz Missa Brevis and McDowall’s Shipping Forecast. Although Puccini wrote his popular Missa di Gloria when he was just 18, it is a remarkably sure-footed setting of the mass, tuneful and operatic. In complete contrast is the contemporary composer Jonathan Dove’s The Passing of the Year. This incantatory, mesmeric and ultimately joyous work celebrates the cycle of life, death, back to life again through words of the poets Blake, Nashe, Dickinson, Peele and Tennyson. Think Steve Reich meets Benjamin Britten: an intense, innovative, evocative choral masterpiece, underpinned by breath-taking piano accompaniment. You may remember that we performed Todd’s upbeat choral suite Footprints in the Sand in November 2023. His Jazz Missa Brevis is a welcome return to his by turns free-wheeling, rhythmic, blusey, upbeat, brash, sensitive, swaggering and energetic take on a familiar liturgy. This varied and exciting concert is completed by the edgy, quirky Shipping Forecast. McDowall’s lyrical, atmospheric and mysterious harmonies conjure up both the waters that surround our islands and the intrepid sailors that have contributed so much to the construction of our rich, contested and restless community of nations: Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. We can’t wait to share this cornucopia of music with you.

Please note the change from a Saturday to Sunday, and an afternoon start. This programme is provisional and may be subject to change.

Booking available four weeks before the concert.