The Easter Break will soon be upon us and thoughts turn to family get-togethers, Easter egg hunts and chocolate in all its many forms. But what about a late Easter musical treat?

Barts Choir – along with the Philharmonia and soloists Jennifer Witton and Ross Ramgobin – is offering an uplifting evening of twentieth century music on the Thursday after Easter, so tear yourself away from the remains of the chocolate and head for the Royal Festival Hall on 4th April 2024 for a (low calorie, rail strike-free) night of wonderful music.

Invite your friends and family and make it a great evening for everyone. Tickets are still available and you can book here.

Even if you can’t come yourself, please forward this to anyone you think might be interested and, if you can, post about our upcoming event on social media – Facebook, Instagram, X or anything else you use –  so that as many people as possible know about our concert.

If you don’t know the works we’re performing, you can get an idea of what you might miss if you don’t come along by listening to the tracks we’ve linked below.  Give them a try! If you’d like to listen to the full works – which we’d recommend, as you’ll appreciate the music more the more times you listen to it – you can find complete recordings of all of them via the tracks we’ve linked here.

Our programme opens with Vaughan Williams’s incredibly moving plea for peace Dona nobis pacem – what could be more appropriate against the background of today’s conflicts around the world? You can listen to part of his setting of Walt Whitman’s poetry here:

After the interval,the Philharmonia, under Ivor Setterfield’s baton, will treat us to Rachmaninov’s orchestral suite Slavonic Dances, which you can sample here:

We finish on a lighter note with Poulenc’s Gloria – a setting of well-known text from the Mass – unconventional, occasionally jazzy, but, above all, beautiful: