This September we’re excited to be preparing for a new season of singing with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the leadership of our new chorus director, Madeleine Venner. With a wide and wonderful variety of concerts on the horizon, we love the brilliant and hugely topical theme for this season, Harmony with Nature, which will be reflected throughout their programming and feature in a number of our concerts.
Harmony with Nature celebrates the beauty of the natural world through music, whilst exploring our place in protecting the planet at a time when the climate crisis has never felt more urgent. It also explores the profound capacity of classical music to inspire us, environmental consciousness, and to remind us that protecting the natural world is not only a moral imperative but also a cultural one. This pertinent theme aims to put music at the centre of the most relevant of debates with music that marvels at oceans, forests, caves, mountains and wildlife through contemporary and modern works as well as masterpieces of an era that saw nature as a mirror of human emotion – and also, perhaps, experienced it more immediately and organically than we do now in the digital age.
Our first concert concert in this series is Vaughan Williams’ extraordinary and wonderful A Sea Symphony which our new Chorus Director Madeleine Venner is delighted to be preparing with us at the start of her new LPC role:
“I’m thrilled to have been appointed Chorus Director by the LPC and to be taking on this exciting new season. I’m also excited to be working with such a talented and committed group of singers. This season is a brilliant one which will allow us to shine, and which will also challenge us musically in a wide variety of ways. In October we’re kicking off with this thoroughly groundbreaking work, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony, which has echoes of the 19th century symphonic tradition but which also leapt forward with a totally new role for the choir in the genre of a choral symphony. The piece is an extraordinary narrative with Walt Whitman’s evocative poetry and one which takes us on a voyage with the sea as a direct confrontation with our mortality and also as a metaphor of setting sail on a spiritual journey and the great possibilities that this journey could have for us.”
Friends of the LPO, including members of the Choir, will be marvelling at groundbreaking ocean floor conservation work taking place in the Horniman Museum and Gardens at a very special social event in September where they will be treated to a private guided tour of the aquarium there with its world leading coral spawning project which is working to rebuild coral reefs in our seas. The museum is home to an extensive range of musical instruments as well as this world class conservation project and is inspiring labs around the world to take on this vital and fascinating work.
Also working passionately to help protect and maintain our natural environment in a completely different way is soprano Elizabeth Ortiz who joined us in 2021:
“I love singing in a choir and sang at school and university. After studying politics in Chicago and New York I moved to Montana – a beautiful Western mountain state which is bigger than the UK – to work on a political campaign. I was living in the Rockies and couldn’t believe how stunning and beautiful they were and how fresh and vibrant nature was there. I absolutely loved it and the work was so exciting.
Then the wild fire season started which is something I’d never experienced before. Once the fires really got going the smoke completely obscured the stunningly beautiful snow capped mountains and it made me realise that however exciting and important my current work was, if you didn’t have a thriving planet then you couldn’t do anything else, so I made the decision to change my career focus and to work in the climate arena. I began studying climate law but I didn’t like law so I changed to policy and climate change and came to Kings College London to complete a Masters degree. Post graduation I worked with KPMG in climate risk and strategy, helping companies and financial institutions to work out their exposure to climate issues and to help mitigate that, for example floods and fires. Now I work in impact investing for Aviva on key sustainable funds to channel capital into positive new projects for the environment and I also do infrastructure funding for things like wind farms, battery storage and carbon removal. Working on climate change projects has become my day to day life and I love it.
I know that people often don’t take climate change seriously or think that individually they can’t make a difference but we all can and it’s really critical we do something about it right now as all the science points to horrible impacts of climate change if we don’t. We can already see serious impacts happening around the world in floods and fires, famine and water shortages and extremes of temperature – look at the summer we’ve just had, one of the hottest on record here in the UK, and the terrible floods that are happening in Pakistan for example as well as wildfires and other climate disasters around the world. Every 0.1 degree of warming really matters and we need to work on that at the highest levels but also at grassroots level by taking individual actions. Simple basic things such as using less water, power or fuel, or recycling and re-using all add up. One of the biggest potential impacts an individual can have is by reducing how much meat they eat – not going vegan or vegetarian necessarily but just eating less: a single cow emits so much methane and takes up so much land and water.
I love that the LPO is taking music, which is an innate natural thing that we can all relate to, and tying that up with nature – it’s amazing. Hopefully it will elicit positive emotional responses in people and help make them think more about wanting to act to help protect our wonderful world and the beautiful nature in it – we all need to be more in touch with nature for the benefit of the planet as well as ourselves.”
Bass and bass voice liaison John Salmon couldn’t agree more:
“I think the fact the the LPO are combining music with this vital environmental awareness is brilliant. It highlights what we need to do for our planet and also draws people more into classical music. One of the things I’m proud about in my life is singing with the choir, another is being a stay at home dad to my two lovely young boys and bringing them up to love music but also to be passionate about enjoying and caring for their environment, so this theme really excites me. Interestingly it was my 7 year old who really influenced my focus on taking action recently after he’d seen a cartoon about plastic waste in the sea and wanted to do something to make a difference. I grew up up by the sea in Cornwall so it has a special resonance for me and I want my boys to feel the same way – I can’t wait for them to hear the Sea Symphony which I’m really excited to sing in October.
I knew here in London of course that we couldn’t work directly for the sea so I decided to find a local group that the children could be part of to make a little difference locally. It’s amazing how we can learn through our children and of course the future of the planet is in our hands – their future depends on our actions now as that’s the world they’ll be growing up in. My oldest seems to have a profound ownership of needing to care for his planet so I’m helping him to do that as much as possible. When we found a nearby group to work with it was such a lovely surprise to discover that it’s the same group my fellow bass David Hodgson has been working with for years, cleaning up the River Wandle and its local environs, so now we do that together.”
Choir librarian and bass David Hodgson (far right of the picture) has been passionate about the environment for many years and working to help protect his local river valley is just one of many things he volunteers to do:
“I feel passionately about treating the planet with respect and am happy to put considerable effort into help keeping the local environment clean – I’d love to live in a world where everyone has the same values but until they do, I will put time into cleaning up and helping to educate others to do the same. Our group does local litter picking but we also get together sometimes to do bigger jobs of actually going into the river and fishing out all kinds of large and ridiculous objects that people have just thrown in there, including Lime Bikes and motorbikes as well as shopping trollies and sofas!
There are a lot of good works like this going on all around the country and there are many good people working on this at all levels. Sometimes it’s difficult to remember that there is actually more good than bad going on in the world and I’m very happy to be part of the good. So I think the LPO’s theme is perfect as focussing on this vital issue through music, which is another important part of life, can be a great help to focus minds and action. Our planet is a fragile thing and we have to treat it with care so that’s definitely something to make music and sing about.”
Come and join us
If you’d like to be part of a friendly, world class choir then why not come along to one of our discovery evenings and/or audition for us? You can find out more here – we’d love to meet you!
