Waltzes, Madrigals & Summer Songs: Royal Free Music Society Choir Midsummer Concert

For our joyous midsummer concert, the Royal Free Music Society choir will be performing a wonderful mix of waltzes, madrigals and love songs from across the ages.  Many of the pieces, like Johannes Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer, draw their inspiration from folk melodies and poems. 

 

First performed in Vienna in 1870, Brahms’ Love Song Waltzes were an instant hit with both professional musicians and amateur music-makers in the home.   The cycle of short romantic songs evoke both exuberant joy and brooding melancholy – all set to the lively ¾ tempo of the rustic Ländler folk dance.

 

Ralph Vaughan Williams too was inspired by traditional folk songs – travelling the English countryside to collect and write down tunes that, by the early 1900s, were already starting to die out.  

 

His contemporary, Edward Elgar was also a great lover of the British countryside - nature clearly inspired the poetic imagery in the graceful songs of his that we’ll be performing.

 

And we’ll be taking you back more than four-hundred years with a selection of classic madrigals – complex polyphonic pieces that were hit songs in Elizabethan England.

 

St John’s Wood Church is wheelchair-accessible.

Event date: 
Saturday, 23 June 2018 - 7:30pm to 10:00pm
Ticket Prices: 
Advance tickets - via choir members & www.ticketsource.co.uk/rfms - £10 (£5 - unwaged/full-time students) On the door - £12/£6. Children: free
Event Poster: 
Location: 
St John's Wood Church
Lord’s Roundabout
NW8 7NE London
United Kingdom