We return to St. James’s Church, Sussex Gardens with a concert of music by 20th and 21st century composers whose imaginations have been fired by inspirational poetry, especially the poetry of sleep, dreams and the darkness of night.

Under the title The Gate to Eternity (one of the settings of the Gibran poems), our programme features the world premiere of Sleep Cycle, a sequence of seven highly individual choral settings by the British composer Edmund Jolliffe. They draw on the work of poets from the late 16th to the early 20th century, from Shakespeare and Byron to the less familiar Marietta Holley and Ella Higginson.

Benjamin Britten’s classic of the unaccompanied choral repertoire Hymn to St. Cecilia, with a powerful text by his friend W.H. Auden, is the other major work in our concert, alongside which we present Jonathan Dove’s setting of Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush and Alexander L’Estrange’s The Prophet, three settings of poems by Khalil Gibran from his 1923 book of the same name.  

Eric Whitacre’s glowing setting of e e cummings’s i thank You God for most this amazing day begins our programme, which also includes Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Beyond the Night Sky and works by Ed Rex and Owain Park.