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| London Oriana Choir and Dominic Ellis-Peckham |
London Oriana Choir, musical director Dominic Ellis-Peckham, celebrated its 50th anniversary last season, and they are continuing the excitement with a 2024/25 season full of good things. The season opens on 18 October at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden with Take Flight, a programme celebrating the night sky with Cecilia McDowall’s Night Flight (with cellist Gabriella Swallow) and Eric Whitacre’s Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine plus music by Bob Chilcott, Ben Parry and many more.
Cecilia McDowall’s Night Flight was written in 2014 to mark the centenary of Harriet Quimby’s pioneering flight across the English channel, setting texts by Sheila Bryer on the mysterious powers of the sea, earth, and air. It won the 2014 British Composer Award in the Choral category. Written in 2001, Eric Whitacre’s Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine uses a text by Whitacre’s friend and long-time collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri which tries to imagine what it would it sound like if Leonardo Da Vinci were dreaming?
December sees the choir in Christmas carol mode with two candlelight concerts at St James’ Piccadilly with music by Sir David Willcocks, Cecilia McDowall, Errollyn Wallen and Eric Whitacre. March 2025 finds the choir performing a Baroque masterpiece, Bach’s Mass in B Minor at Holy Sepulchre, Holborn Viaduct, and in May they perform a programme of motets by Brahms and Bruckner at Our Most Holy Redeemer Church, Exmouth Market, and the choir then takes this programme to Padua and Venice. A packed season ends in July 2025 when they are joined by guests Maz O’Connor, Will Lang and Niopha Keegan for Four Corners, folk stories and sounds from the four corners of the Isles at Cecil Sharp House.
Full details from the choir’s website.
