Enter Wonderland with this imaginative King’s Singers programme, taking you on a wild, colourful journey.
György Ligeti’s six Nonsense Madrigals, each setting playful children’s poetry or extracts from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, provide a musical spine to the first half, commemorating 100 years since the composer’s birth in 1923.
Each madrigal is paired with a contrasting work that delves deeper into the different worlds Ligeti has chosen. They include a Renaissance exploration of birdsong, the wily activity of magical woodland creatures, and the fairytale of The Musicians of Bremen. These mythical stories reach their zenith with Judith Bingham’s extended work Tricksters (written for The King’s Singers in 2019), which unearths what could happen when miscreants from different world mythologies come together for the first time.
Finally, we’ll celebrate some of the favourite wonderlands painted in the films of Walt Disney over the last 100 years, alongside a selection of songs from their much-loved close-harmony repertoire.
- Milligan & Clare (arr. Gordon Langford): Alice in Wonderland (3’)
- Ligeti: Nonsense Madrigals (14’)
- Richard Strauss: Traumlicht (6’)
- Janequin: Le chant des oiseaux (6’)
- Brumel: Lamentations of Jeremiah (8’)
- Martland: Poor Roger (4’)
- Ravel: Ronde (from Trois Chansons) (3’)
- Williamson: The Musicians of Bremen (9’)
- Judith Bingham: Tricksters (10’)
Duration: 100 minutes, including 20-minute interval
Price: £15, £20 Under 30s half price
Tickets are available from brittenpearsarts.org/events/the-kings-singers-wonderland
Date & Time
15th June 2023, 2:00pm - doors open 1:30pm
Venue
St Peter's by the Waterfront - St Peter's Church, College Street, Ipswich, IP4 1BF