Music for a Winter's Night

A concert of winter music from around the world and Christmas music from closer to home

Join The Fourth Choir for a seasonal celebration of winter, a mulled cider and a mince pie in the stunning church of St Clement Danes in the Strand.

Opening with Benjamin Britten's evocative Hymn to the Virgin, the first half of the concert explores themes of miraculous birth from the Christian tradition and beyond, with early works by underrepresented composers including Vicente Lusitano – the first black composer published in Europe.

The Choir also continues to explore the recently rediscovered legacy of women composers who worked in Renaissance Italian convents: composers such as Isabella Leonarda, who didn’t start to compose until the age of 50 and went on to compose over 200 works; Raffaella Aleotti who published the first book of sacred music by a woman in 1593; and Sulpitia Cesis who published a book of Spiritual Motets in 1619.

These are paired with more modern works by Nathaniel Dett, Cecilia McDowall and Shruthi Rajeskar's shimmering Star of Rohini, which draws parallels between the mythologies surrounding the births of the infant Jesus and Krishna.

In the second half of the concert we will hear traditional and reimagined carols and seasonal works in Swedish, Spanish, Hebrew and German. A poignant trio of lullabies leads on to Jonathan Dove's dramatic The Three Kings before a blissful and atmospheric ending of Jan Sandström's arrangement of Praetorius' Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.