Hesperos Choir
Carol Singing at Cecil Court and Seven Stars Christmas Concert marking Hesperos’ seventh anniversary.
Carol Singing at Cecil Court
Wednesday 3 December 2025 - 18:00 - 20:00
Cecil Court, London, England, WC2N 4EZ
Hesperos Choir are back at Cecil Court, near Trafalgar Square for the Streets Christmas Party, singing carols and taking a collection for The Connection at St. Martin’s ( a vital homelessness charity based in central London, offering practical support, advice, and care to people sleeping rough or at risk of homelessness).
Seven Stars
Saturday 13 December 2025 - 19:00 - 21:00
St. Augustine's Church, Kilburn Park Road, London, NW6 5XB
This year’s Christmas concert marks Hesperos’ seventh anniversary, with a programme shaped around the seven great O Antiphons of Advent. These ancient chants, sung here in their plainchant form and in luminous modern settings, call for light and wisdom in the darkest days of winter.
This constellation culminates in Jonathan Dove’s radiant Seek Him that Maketh the Seven Stars, one of the most beloved contemporary choral anthems, which imagines first the glimmering of Pleiades and Orion, and then a whole heaven of starlight - ‘yea, the darkness shineth as the day, the night is light about me’. This theme finds a new voice in a specially commissioned work by Will Todd, Starlight, written for Hesperos, alongside Oliver Tarney’s The Wise Men and the Star.
A crystalline quality shimmers through the evening’s music, especially in the meditative minimalism of Arvo Pärt, whose 90th birthday we also celebrate this year. We will also perform ‘…which was the son of …’, in which the text moves backwards through time from the nativity to the creation of the world. His music alongside works by Herbert Howells, Toby Young, CaroIine Shaw, and Vytautas Miškinis, holds together a programme which is at once mystical and celebratory.