Elin Manahan Thomas with Elizabeth Kenny

Elin Manahan Thomas - soprano
Elizabeth Kenny - lute & theorbo

NOW WINTER COMES SLOWLY
To warm your hearts during Advent, this is a programme which welcomes festivities with delicious music from all around Europe. From Handel’s merry arias to Bach’s more contemplative hymns, we bring you a collection of seasonal and celebratory songs. Elin Manahan Thomas is one of the most exceptional sopranos of her generation. Since releasing her début album “Eternal Light in 2007, with the OAE, she has performed at many of the world’s most prestigious venues and festivals, and with leading orchestras and conductors, including the Edinburgh, Canterbury and Lufthansa Festivals, at the World Première of Sir John Taverner’s Requiem and in 2018 she was honoured to perform at the Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. (Ravishing simplicity, The Times). She is joined by Elizabeth Kenny, one of Europe’s leading lute players. Equally at home in solo. chamber music and the opera house, she combines a love of the lute repertoire with a flair for imaginative collaborations that enrich an unusually varied performing life. In twenty years of touring she has played with many of the world’s best period instrument groups and experienced many different approaches to music making. She played with Les Arts Florissants 1992-2007 and with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment 1997-2015 and still returns to initiate seventeenth century projects such as The Hypochondriack and A Restoration Tempest. (Indecently beautiful, Toronto Post – Radical, The Guardian).

Handel              So shall the lute and harp awake
Monteverdi        Exulta Filia
Merula              Canzonetta spiritual sopra alla nanna
J.S.Bach             Ich freue mich in dir
                           Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier
                           O Jesulein süss
A. Scarlatti          Fortunati pastori…Tocco la prima sorte
Campion            Now winter nights enlarge
Purcell               Scenes from King Arthur and the Fairy Queen
Sequence of traditional Christmas songs:
Trad. French      A minuit fut fait un reveil
Trad. English      The truth sent from above
Adam lay ybounden
Gabriel’s message
Trad. Welsh       Carol y Plygain
Handel              Or let the merry bells ring round

Saturday 14th December 2019 - 7pm
Tickets: £21.00 / £18.50 / £16.00