2016 marks our 21st birthday, and we’re excited to announce a full and varied schedule of concerts for our anniversary year – looking back at some of our favourite works and striking out in some new directions as well!
From a “scratch” choir formed in 1995 for a one-off performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers, Pegasus has grown to be one of the UK’s leading and most active chamber choirs. We’re proud of our wide-ranging programming, our premieres of pieces by Thomas Adès, John Tavener and Francis Grier, our collaborations with choreographers, dancers and directors, and our ongoing work with prestigious musical partners such as the London Handel Festival and Tilford Bach Society. We continue to be glad to support important charities with our music-making, ranging from the Friends of Shakespeare’s Globe to Princess Alice Hospice. And we’ve enjoyed our critical acclaim in the press and our appearances on radio and television, as well as our international competition successes.
Classical and popular, sacred and secular, old and new: Pegasus has sung it all, and our concerts in 2016, taking place in London, Surrey and Sussex, will reflect that variety. There will be some of the great Baroque masterworks which our audiences love to hear as much as we enjoy performing them, including Handel’s Dixit Dominus (March 11) and J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor (June 12 & 13), all with the marvellous London Handel Orchestra. Our director, Matthew Altham, is particularly excited to be leading our concert of Monteverdi’s Vespers, commemorating our inaugural performance of the same work 21 years ago! In July we’ll sing a programme of works celebrating Shakespeare in the beautiful setting of Winchelsea in Sussex, to mark the 400th anniversary of his death. And November will take us to Grayshott in Surrey for Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, once more with the London Handel Orchestra.
We begin the year with an eclectic offering of pieces that have been among the choir’s favourites over the past few years. Pegasus singers are getting ready to vote on the selection that they’ll perform on February 7 at St George’s, Bloomsbury. And later in the summer it’ll be your turn: we’ll give a concert of works voted for by our audiences – 21 pieces, in fact, if we can fit them all in!
Please check our Events page for more information about the concerts coming up in the first half of this exciting year. We’ll be updating it frequently as more information becomes available. We look forward to seeing you soon!