A hugely successful concert tour that has seen thousands of people across the country singing together to turn folk songs into hymns will have a final performance in Camden Town on Sunday 14th October as a fundraiser for St Michael’s Church.
The critically acclaimed From Pub to Pulpit tour has performed to full houses at more than twenty Cathedrals and Festivals, celebrating Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 150th birthday. Camden Town will be the only Central London venue of the year-long tour.
It’s been featured on BBC Radio Four; BBC Radio Three; screened live internationally on TV and was hailed as a “Highlight of the Vaughan Williams Festival Year” by The Times; The Guardian; The Telegraph; The Observer; Gramophone and Living Tradition Folk magazines.
The tour began on the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee weekend and crossed the country from Exeter and Wells to Newcastle, Lincoln and Carlisle. This performance will mark the end of the Vaughan Williams’ anniversary year, which his birthday on 12 October.
“We want to say thank you to St Michael’s, because it’s where Broomdasher rehearse every week. We want to raise the roof there with everyone singing at the tops of their voices as they have across the country” said Broomdasher’s Margaret Moore, also a Camden Town resident.
Father Michael Thomas, Parish Priest at St Michael’s, who is a devotee of Vaughan Williams, said: “We’re very excited about this, not least because Vaughan Williams’ wife Ursula lived in Gloucester Crescent, just a five minute walk from the church”.
Broomdasher will be joined by instrumental duo, The Pagoda Project, with renowned accordionist Paul Hutchinson and clarinettist Karen Wimhurst.
In the concert, the audience join in with the organ, choir and two groups in a unique and rousing tribute to Vaughan Williams, who was a renowned folk song collector. He borrowed the tunes from some of the working people’s favourite folk songs to use for some of the best hymns in the 1906 English Hymnal he edited.
Broomdasher and The Pagoda Project take the audience through the acapella folk song, dance variations and a climax with full-blooded hymn renditions.
They include “To Be a Pilgrim”, and “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say”, transformed from the folk songs “Our Captain Calls” and “The Murder of Maria Marten”.
