We promote five Crouch End Festival Chorus concerts a year in a range of venues in central and north London. We organise exciting and innovative programmes which entertain and stretch audiences – often with new commissions and world premieres.
We are also busy with a range of bookings to appear in concerts, recordings, and gigs with leading classical, operatic and contemporary music artists.
You can find more information here about our repertoire from 1984 to now.
Sunday 9 July 2023 6.00pm
Alexandra Palace Theatre, Alexandra Palace Way, London N22 7AY
Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem
William Grant Still Wailing Woman
Ethel Smyth The Wreckers Overture
Crouch End Festival Chorus
London Orchestra da Camera
Francesca Chiejina Soprano
Oliver Zwarg Baritone
David Temple conductor
Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem is considered by many to be the greatest of all the Requiems, and given the competition, that is no mean feat. Unlike most Requiems, Brahms' does not set the Latin Requiem Mass but instead uses his own native German language, focusing more on those who are left to mourn than those who have departed. It is a work of great comfort, with moments of joy as well as sadness.
William Grant Still’s work Wailing Woman was written in 1946. The music and the words - by Verna Arvey, the wife of the composer - highlight the similarities between the black and the Jewish experience of prejudice.
Starting the concert will be Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers Overture which begins her opera, recently performed at Glyndebourne and the BBC Proms in 2022.