St Augustine's Singers: Easter Service
2026-04-05 09:30 - 11:00 UTC | St Augustine’s Church, Richmond Road, Cambridge
An Easter Communion Service, with music sung by St Augustine’s Singers, conducted by Paul Jackson.

Help2Ukraine: Messiah
2026-04-06 18:00 - 20:00 | St Edmund’s Church, 5 Bartholomew Green, Southwold, Suffolk, IP18 6JA
Paul Jackson conducts a special charity concert performance of Handel’s Messiah, in aid of Help2Ukraine (Suffolk) Ambulances for Ukraine.

In 2024 and 2025, Help2Ukraine (Suffolk) sent four ambulances fully equipped with life-saving supplies to Lviv, as part of a convoy of eight. In 2026, we will do the same. There is an urgent need to continue to send ambulances to Ukraine. It is not about politics but life and death. It often feels as though there is nothing we can do to make the world a better place, but supporting this cause is something you can do to make a direct and positive difference.

Each year our successful fund-raising has included donations from private individuals, an auction, a cake & coffee morning, a dog show, mini-fete and sponsored walk. In 2026, in addition to having another dog show in May, this April we are holding a special concert.

The concert will be based on a Come-and-Sing rehearsal and performance of highlights from Handel’s masterpiece Messiah. This will be a joyous as well as a thought-provoking event, bringing together singers from choral societies across East Anglia alongside professional singers, instrumentalists and actors. There will be readings to help link the music, and to place it in the context of vulnerability and war, peace and reflection. It is neither a religious nor a political event, but takes the spirit of Messiah and invites us all to make a difference.

The rehearsal is from 2pm to 5pm, and the performance starts at 6pm.

The cost will be £20 for singers, and £25 for the audience (£10 under-21s). There will be refreshments between rehearsal and concert, and in the interval.

Registration and tickets: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/help2ukraine/t-plqaoln

New Palace Opera: Bluebeard's Castle
2026-04-22 13:00 - 14:00 | St Peter’s Church, St Peter's St, St Albans, AL1 3HG
New Palace Opera performs Béla Bartók’s one-act opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, in a new concert arrangement by Jonathan Finney.

In his interpretation of the pan-European folk-tale, Belá Bartók reveals the emotional abyss in this gloomy psychological thriller by presenting the seven chambers within Bluebeard’s castle/mind, symbolising his obsessions, with powerfully expressive pictorial and psychological music. While thrillingly sustaining the emotional high tension in this one-act opera, Bartók lays bare the inner tragedy of the doomed relationship between Judith and Bluebeard.

This performance, in English, is performed in the version for chamber orchestra by the co-director of New Palace Opera, Jonathan Finney. This is the latest of his arrangements for smaller orchestras, which include The Marriage of Figaro, Hansel and Gretel, La navaraisse [Massenet] and Oedipus Rex, all for Palace Opera and Der fliegende Holländer and Die Meistersinger for Fulham Opera.

Cast

Duke Bluebeard, Pauls Putnins

Judith, Callie Gaston

New Palace Opera Chamber Orchestra

Conductor, Michael Thorne

Percy Grainger Society Talk: Grainger the Educator
2026-05-14 21:00 - 22:00 | Online via Zoom
This meeting continues the Percy Grainger Society’s 2025–26 members’ meeting series, Grainger the Educator, a celebration of Percy Grainger’s often overlooked yet enduring influence as a teacher and educator. This talk, given by Percy Grainger Society President, Paul Jackson, considers Grainger’s lecture series for New York University, and for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, given in the 1930s.

St Augusine's Singers: Music from the Movies
2026-06-21 18:00 - 19:00
The St Augustine’s Singers, conducted by Paul Jackson, present a programme of choral music from and for the movies. The concert includes Michel Legrand’s How Do You Keep the Music Playing, and The Windmills of Your Mind, JS Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, and music by Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten.

Haslingfield Choir: Songs and Sonnets
2026-07-04 18:00 - 20:00 | All Saints’ Church, Church Way, Haslingfield, CB23 1JF
Haslingfield Choir, conducted by Paul Jackson, present a programme of settings of Shakespeare, including George Shearing’s Songs and Sonnets from Shakespeare, choral music by Felix Mendelssohn, Charles Wood, and Bob Chilcott, and music for voice and piano by Gerald Finzi and Michael Tippett. The evening also features readings given by members of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival.

St Augustine's Singers: Music from the Movies
2026-07-05 18:00 - 19:00 | St Augustine’s Church, Richmond Road, Cambridge

New Palace Opera: Káťa Kabanová
2026-07-19 18:30 - 21:00 | St John’s Church, Waterloo, London, SE1 8TY
New Palace Opera, conducted by Michael Thorne, present a concert performance of Leoš Janáček’s opera, Káťa Kabanová.

This story of one woman’s bid for escape from her suffocating community reflects the composer’s unrequited love for a woman resembling Katya herself. Janáček once wrote, “Katya’s suffering is my own,” bringing forth from the Czech composer a work of lacerating intensity, compelling tension and wondrous lyricism.

This concert performance will be sung in English, with translation by Norman Tucker.

www.newpalaceopera.com/katya-kabanova

Saffron Opera Group: Dialogues des Carmélites
2026-09-13 14:30 - 17:00 | Saffron Hall, Audley End Road, Saffron Walden, CB11 4UH
Saffron Opera Group, conducted by Michael Thorne, perform a concert version of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites.

St Augustine's Singers
2026-11-07 18:00 - 19:00 | St Augustine’s Church, Richmond Road, Cambridge
St Augustine’s Singers, conducted by Paul Jackson, present their autumn concert, featuring the first performance of Kevin Flanagan’s Flows From the River’s Edge.

Haslingfield Choir and Orchestra: St Cecilia Mass
2026-12-05 19:30 - 21:30 | All Saints’ Church, Church Way, Haslingfield, CB23 1JF
Haslingfield Choir and Orchestra, conducted by Paul Jackson, perform Charles Gounod’s lyrical Messe solennelle en l’honneur de Sainte-Cécile, the ‘St Cecilia Mass’. The concert also includes movements from Joseph Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne.
