In recent years there has been a very welcome increase in the performance of music by female composers on the radio, in recordings and in our concert halls. For so many centuries women rarely had the chance to be heard as performers and composers and they were discouraged from pursuing More →

On Friday the 22nd of March, LCS and Hackney Singers will be returning to the Royal Festival Hall at the world-famous Southbank Centre. Joining us for Mozart’s Mass in C Minor are the London Mozart Players, and an impressive array of soloists including soprano Elin Manahan Thomas – who sang More →

It was in 1907 that Cheltenham-born composer Gustav Holst became Director of Music at Morley College, Lambeth – formerly known as Morley Memorial College for Working Men & Women. Holst was a well-liked teacher whose appointment lasted a total of seventeen years, and in 1910 he wrote the short choral More →

By the late 1870s the music of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák had already travelled all the way from Bohemia to Great Britain. It soon became so popular that in 1884 the man himself – with no English and never having been on a ship or seen the sea – arrived More →

2018 is a key year for the people of what is now Slovakia and the Czech Republic. For one hundred years ago, on the 28th of October 1918, a new state arose from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I. It was on that day, in its More →

New members of LCS might have spotted their fellow singers carrying a mug about their person at rehearsals. This isn’t a new fashion trend, but it is an LCS attempt to go green! With over 200 members in our choir, we were getting through a lot of paper cups at More →

On July 10th, Nico de Villiers and James Orford will be playing the original two-piano version of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and in chatting to a friend about our performance, LCS soprano Penny Champion was told an anecdote straight from New York, New York. ‘Aunt Irene’ travelled to America More →

Last October, our news item on Joseph Haydn and Jonathan Dove reminded readers that LCS members had participated in a production of Jonathan Dove’s Tobias & the Angel in 2006, and commercially recorded the work four years later. Now as we sing more of Jonathan’s music at our July 10th More →

James Lark’s Broadside Ballads, as premiered by The Bromley Boy Singers in the City of London last year – and to be performed at our concert on July 10th – speaks of topics of today, but ballads and broadsides themselves have their own long and ancient history. Ballads were originally narrative More →

Around 55 LCS singers, together with a group of choir supporters, travelled to Berlin in mid-April as part of Lewisham’s long-standing twinning relationship with Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Following our first joint concert with Johannischer Chor Berlin in Lewisham in 2016, we were keen to re-join them and to strengthen the musical and More →