Displaying a wonderful and vivid musical imagination, Saint-Saëns wrote his light-hearted suite Le carnaval des animaux in 1886 with an unusual scoring for two pianists, a sparse string section, glass harmonica and a xylophone. His imagined sounds from elegant swans, roaring lions, rattling dinosaur bones to a fishy pellucid underwater world are now often heard interspersed with the witty poems of Ogden Nash who wrote these companions to the music in 1949. By contrast, Edith Sitwell’s near nonsense poems entitled Façade: An Entertainment provided the starting point for William Walton’s accompaniments. The two are cleverly interwoven and performed together with the spoken words fitting amusingly over rhythm and melody.
Summer Music in City Churches is a fledgling festival, founded in 2018, presenting beautiful music to inspire, divert and engage, in ancient and architecturally stunning churches in London's Square Mile. Standing cheek by jowl with City offices, these churches are glorious settings in which to listen and reflect: oases of history, beauty and peace amidst the 24-7 hurly-burly of City life.
The theme for the second festival in June 2019 is Words and Music. During a week and a half of events, you will find sumptuous settings of poetry, lyrical music inspired by poetry, plays and literature, words that illuminate music with biographical insight and context, music of significance to literary heroes and heroines, and more: a lyrical celebration.