Following its successful premiere in February 2023, Out of the Shadows, an evening of music by Brixton-based composer Robert Hugill will return this year with performances for Pride 2024 in Clapham, and at the Glasperlenspiel Festival in Tartu, Estonia, during the city’s year as one of the European Capitals of Culture.
The performers are tenor Ben Vonberg-Clark (precentor at the church of St John the Divine, Kennington, and conductor of the London Youth Boys’ Choir), baritone Jonathan Eyers (currently a Young Artist at the National Opera Studio), and pianist Nigel Foster (founder and artistic director of the London Song Festival).
As part of Omnibus Theatre’s 96 Festival, a celebration of queerness and theatre, Out of the Shadows will be performed on 16 June.
On Friday 4 July the programme will be presented at St John’s Church, Tartu as part of the Glasperlenspiel Festival, founded in 1995 by composer and music producer, Peeter Vähi.
The programme features two cantatas that take listeners from the twilight world of the 19th- and early 20th-century homosexual to a desperate search for eternal life, alongside songs celebrating love in all forms.
Out of the Shadows moves from the earliest tentative admissions of same sex attraction, to cruising in a bath house in imperial Russia to American poet 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 bodysnatching 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.
Alongside these there are love songs and settings of Michaelangelo’s sonnets plus a depiction of an Aids candlelit memorial.
omnibus-clapham.org/out-of-the-shadows
Omnibus theatre
1 Clapham Common Northside
London SW4 0QW
16 June, 7pm
£15 standard £13 concession £6 under 25s
