Heroines - 900 years of women in song | Whitehall Choir/Cantus Novus Wien

In the first part of this concert, Whitehall Choir will present pieces exclusively by women: the 12th-century German Benedictine abbess and visionary Hildegard von Bingen, the Venetian baroque composer Barbara Strozzi and Fanny Mendelssohn from the romantic period. We shall also be singing works by two women who died tragically young 100 years ago – Lili Boulanger and Morfydd Owen – as well as pieces by the mid-20th-century British composer Elizabeth Poston and Master of the Queen’s Music, Judith Weir.

The choir is delighted to be joined in the second part by Cantus Novus Wien with whom we performed on tour in Vienna in 2016. Cantus Novus will be singing music from the German and Austrian canon: Bruckner, Brahms, Alma Mahler and Berta Aichinger. Finally, the two groups will form a combined choir in Roxanna Panufnik's Westminster Mass and Paul Spicer's 'Glory be to God for dappled things’, which we so enjoyed performing jointly at our last meeting.

The year 2018 marks the centenary of women's suffrage in Austria, as well as in the UK, and we look forward to exploring some beautiful and thrilling music, largely by women, some of which is rarely performed and has never been recorded.

(Illustration - Fanny Mendelssohn, sketched by her future husband Wilhelm Hensel)