Programme

Carols for choir, audience and organ, seasonal Christmas music performed by the Locrian Ensemble including ‘12 days of Christmas’, and carols for soloists and orchestra.

Locrian Ensemble 
Southend Girls’ and Boys’ Choirs
Annette Wardell Soprano
Ashley Stillburn Tenor
Justin Pearson/ Roger Humphrey Conductors

Performers

The Southend Boys’ Choir was formed in 1970, and is one of the best known in the UK. The choir has performed with major orchestras, including RPO, LSO, Philharmonia, City of London Sinfonia, BBC SO, and has made many highly acclaimed recordings. The choir performs regularly at major venues around the country and abroad.

The Southend Girls’ Choir was founded in 1988, and has since built an enviable reputation across the South East and further afield. The choir has broadcast on television and radio, and performs regularly at prestigious concert halls and Cathedrals across the world.

Both choir’s concert engagements include singing at the Royal Albert Hall, St Martin in the Fields, St James Piccadilly and in Churches and Cathedrals abroad as part of their annual tours.

Bringing together some of the most prominent string soloists in London, the Locrian Ensemble, was formed in 1995 and has established an enviable reputation for its recordings, broadcasts and live performances. The group frequently expands, and this provides a vehicle for concerto playing for the group’s key members. For instance, the Locrian Ensemble regularly performs at St Martin-in-the-Fields, presenting programmes of baroque and classical music, whilst also enlarging, when required, into a compact chamber orchestra.

The Locrian have recorded works for BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM, and released compact discs on the ASV label (Mozart and Schubert Quintets), the Bracken label (Classics by Candlelight), the Guild label (Beethoven Symphonies arranged by Simrock for String Quintet) and on the Dutton Laboratories Epoch label (Rebecca Clarke, Arthur Benjamin and Richard Arnell, the last of these dics being ‘Editor?s Choice’).

The Locrian Ensemble are frequently heard on television and on film. Recent recordings include the score for Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Stories in Dublin, as well as playing the score to the film of ‘Wilde’, starring Stephen Fry. They have also notably supplied the music for popular televison series such as ‘My Uncle Silas’, ‘Stig of the Dump’, ‘Animal Hospital’ and ‘Judge John Deed’.

The Locrian Ensemble is the resident musical group at the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich, and from here they travel to all parts of the country, making them one of the the busiest chamber music group working in Britain today.

“The Locrians have a formidable international reputation” London Evening Standard