Beckenham Chorale – A Christmas Matinee
Saturday 1st December 2018 at 4:00 pm
Vaughan Williams – Fantasia on Christmas Carols
Alan Bullard – O Come Emmanuel
and a selection of carols including some for audience
Jonathan Brown baritone
Luke Green organ
Conductor: Mark Griffiths
Box office opens Tuesday 10th October
Nave Seats (those in the main body of the church) £13 and £10 in advance (£14 and £11 on the door)
Side aisle seats £8 (some are restricted view)
On-line Bookings via this link
Telephone bookings 020 8658 0329 and 020 8658 0875
In person at St George’s Parish Office (in the church Monday to Friday 9.30am to 2.30pm)
Refreshments
Refreshments will not be available at this event.
Artist Information
Mark Griffiths
Musical Director
Mark studied at Trinity College, Cambridge and the Royal College of Music and began his career as a professional singer. He has been Musical Director of the London-based chamber choir Coro since 2003, conducting them to international competitive success, in regular concerts throughout Britain and Europe, and on radio and CD. He also works with large symphonic choruses including the Philharmonia Chorus and the Brighton Festival Chorus.
Mark has a wealth of experience with younger singers, too, as Director of the award-winning Berkshire Youth Choirs and a music mentor for the National Festival of Music for Youth, and is currently Director of Choirs at the Junior Department of Trinity College of Music. He has also directed the Young Conductors’ Course for the Association of British Choral Directors.
Beckenham Chorale
Beckenham Chorale is a mixed voice choir of about 80 voices founded in 1960 and affiliated to Making Music and the Bromley Arts Council. It gives three concerts a year at St George’s Church Beckenham and rehearses each week broadly through the school year at the St George’s Church Hall.
With a varied repertoire it is best known for our spirited performances of the great and exciting choral works. In recent years, works performed include Bach ‘Magnificat’, Vivaldi ‘Gloria’, Orff ‘Carmina Burana’, Rossini ‘Stabat Mater’, Dvorak ‘Mass in D’, Tippett ‘A Child of our Time’, Handel ‘Messiah’ and Verdi ‘Requiem’.’
The Chorale engages professional soloists and orchestral instrumentalists, with whom we have a long association, to perform with the choir.
Jonathan Brown
Baritione
Jonathan Brown was born in Toronto and studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music there, the University of Western Ontario and, after moving to England, at Cambridge University and the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh with Sir Thomas Allen and Anthony Rolfe Johnson. He made his solo debut with Sir John Eliot Gardiner in Holland in a concert of Bach cantatas and thereafter was a regular soloist with performances in Zurich, Brussels and Paris as part of the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage and the subsequent CDs.
Recent solo concert work has included Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s B minor Mass and the St. John and St. Matthew Passions at Westminster Abbey, Haydn’s The Seasons for the Norwich Philharmonic Society, Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony for the Portsmouth Choral Union and regular appearances with the OAE and the Gabrieli Consort. He has also worked with Philippe Herreweghe touring South America as Christus in Bach’s St John Passion and he features in Purcell’s Ode to St Cecilia for Harmonia Mundi. He was also a soloist on the Harmonia Mundi recordings of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Blow’s Venus and Adonis under the direction of René Jacobs, in the Fauré Requiem with the London Festival Orchestra for BMG, Sullivan’s The Golden Legend for Hyperion and, for Priory Records, a recently-released world première recording, also with the Portsmouth Choral Union, of Samuel Wesley’s masterpiece Confitebor tibi, Domine.
His wide-ranging operatic roles have featured composers as diverse as Puccini, Leoncavallo, Donizetti, Mozart, Handel, Purcell, Cavalli and Monteverdi, including Mozart’s Idomeneo for Sir Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic in the Salzburg Easter Festival and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo at the Opéra de Lille, the Théâtre du Chatêlet, Paris and L’Opéra du Rhin with Emmanuelle Haim.
Luke Green
Organist
A native of Sydney, Australia, Luke has developed a career as a conductor, operatic coach, and harpsichordist with Europe’s foremost ensembles, festivals and opera houses including the Salzburg Festival, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Florence’s Maggio Musicale, Bavarian State Opera, Frankfurt Opera, Zurich Opera, Madrid’s Teatro Real and Vienna’s Theater an der Wien. A chance meeting with conductor Ivor Bolton in 2001 led to a long and fruitful working relationship. Luke has subsequently worked with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Harry Christophers, , Mark Wigglesworth, Paul McCreesh, the German conductors Thomas Hengelbrock and Lothar Zagrosek and the Austrian violinist and conductor Thomas Zehetmair.
Luke has particular skills in training young singers and in 2014 was made an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music. As Artistic Director of the Rameau Ensemble, he recently gave a masterclass for young artists with Sandrine Piau (Soprano) at Handel & Hendrix (formerly the Handel House Museum) in London. Although most of his work is in the early and classical repertoire, Luke comes to us hotfoot from Harrogate, where he has been working on a production of Iolanthe for the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival.
< Back to Past Events