Following their premiere last year, they feature two cantatas that take us from the twilight world of the 19th & early 20th century homosexual to a desperate search for eternal life, alongside songs celebrating love in all forms.
The performers are tenor Ben Vonberg-Clark (precentor at St John the Divine, Kennington), baritone Jonathan Eyers (a Young Artist at the National Opera Studio) and pianist Nigel Foster (artistic director of the London Song Festival).
Out of the Shadows moves from the earliest tentative admissions of same sex attraction, to cruising in a bath house in Imperial Russia to Walt Whitman’s unashamed admission of his sexuality.
Et expecto explores the search for eternal life in different forms, from the certainty of the Latin creed, to explorations of cryogenics, the body-snatching of Burke and Hare and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, before resolving in the homoerotic pantheistic transcendentalism of Walt Whitman with its celebration of Death itself.
