The Birds | Crouch End Festival Chorus

Look forward to spring with a programme of music inspired by our feathered friends.

Orlando Gibbons’s best-loved madrigal The Silver Swan evokes the stately beauty of the most regal of birds. The song of the lark is realised in the spiralling melody of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s work for solo violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending. And in a new work first performed at the Barbican in 2011, Will Todd stirs the senses in his setting of Keats’s poem exploring the uneasy relationship between pleasure and pain, Ode to a Nightingale.

Finally, in celebration of the centenary of his birth, the choir presents Benjamin Britten’s Spring Symphony, featuring the famous herald of the new season, the cuckoo. Britten engages the forces of large orchestra (including cow horn), chorus, children’s choir and three soloists to bring his vision of spring into glorious life.