Haslingfield Choir and Orchestra: Messiah
2026-03-21 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | All Saints’ Church, Church Way, Haslingfield, CB23 1JF
Haslingfield Choir and Orchestra, conducted by Paul Jackson, perform Handel’s most well-known oratorio, Messiah.

Soprano: Rachel Godsill

Alto: Ute Leptit-Clare

Tenor: Gary Rushton

Bass: Alistair Bamford

St Augustine's Singers: Meditation Event
2026-04-03 12:00 - 13:00 | St Augustine’s Church, Richmond Road, Cambridge
A Good Friday Meditation Event, with music sung by St Augustine’s Singers, conducted by Paul Jackson.

St Augustine's Singers: Easter Service
2026-04-05 09:30 - 11:00 | 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
This on-line 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.

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 in the Movies
2026-07-05 18:00 - 19:00 | St Augustine’s Church, Richmond Road, Cambridge
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.

Private Recital
2026-07-15 16:00 - 17:00 | King’s College, King's Parade, Cambridge
A private recital featuring Percy Grainger’s Blithe Bells, Beautiful Fresh Flower and Bridal Lullaby.

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.

Public Talk: Reconstructing Grainger the Educator
2026-09-24 18:00 - 19:00 | Grainger Museum, Grattan Street, Parkville, Victoria, 3010, Australia
Join us for the next talk in our music research series, with President of the Percy Grainger Society, Paul Jackson. The Museum will be open from 5:30 pm, with the talk starting at 6:00 pm. Bookings encouraged; drop-ins welcome.

Percy Grainger spent a significant part of his professional life teaching and educating, an aspect of his multi-faceted make-up that has received relatively little critical attention to date. Aside from the lecture recitals that ran through much of his performing career, he enjoyed a highly lucrative period of engagement as piano teacher with the Chicago Music School between 1919 and 1931, and as teacher, performer and conductor at the Interlochen Music Camps, Michigan, between 1937 and 1944. But it is in his public lecture series “A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music,” delivered at New York University between 1932 and 1933, and “Music: A Commonsense View of all Types”, delivered for the Australian Broadcasting Commission between 1934 and 1935, that Grainger came closest to formalising his world-view of music in a manner intended to provide a framework for broader understanding and engagement, and, ultimately, enlightenment.

In these lecture series, Grainger pursued a form of comparative musical analysis that sought to reveal “the threads of unity” that ran through music from different genres, traditions and periods. Grainger selected a very wide range of apparently disparate music to illustrate his points, drawing on sources that included newly-available recordings from the ethnographic collections of the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv, as well as a host of invited performers. Such musical examples served as a means of demonstrating that disparate cultural phenomena shared correspondences of technical means of realisation, and of aesthetic and emotional values. Grainger’s analyses are, by turns, precise and scientific, and meandering and misguided, but are centred around the notion that “the highest flights of music are a spiritualizing influence inducing contemplation and rapture and leading mankind toward a more peaceful, harmonious and angelic life (on earth)’.

In this talk, I provide a framework for better understanding the core ideas expounded in Grainger’s lecture series, placing them within the context of the then-emerging field of ethnomusicology and of parallel attempts of formalised music education that sought to make the world’s music available to the wider public. A key method of illustrating Grainger’s central ideas is the reconstruction of the musical content of selected lectures—drawn from a range of archival sources—which naturally serves to illustrate his central beliefs more vividly and tellingly than by a consideration of his written words alone.

St Augustine's Singers: St Cecilia Mass
2026-11-07 18:00 - 19:00 | St Augustine’s Church, Richmond Road, Cambridge
The St Augustine’s Singers, conducted by Paul Jackson, present their autumn concert, featuring Charles Gounod’s lyrical Messe solennelle en l’honneur de Sainte-Cécile, the ‘St Cecilia Mass’, in the version for chorus, soloists and organ.

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 Maurice Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, and the first set of Joseph Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne.

St Augustine's Singers: Christmas Concert
2026-12-12 13:00 - 14:00 | Michaelhouse Centre, Trinity Street, Cambridge
Christmas music, carols and solos by the St Augustine’s Singers, conducted by Paul Jackson, at Cambridge’s Michaelhouse Centre.

Newtown Ensemble: Concert Champêtre
2027-01-16 19:00 - 21:00 | Stockbridge Parish Church, 7b Saxe Coburg Street, Edinburgh, EH3 5BN, United Kingdom
The Newtown Ensemble, conducted by Michael Thorne, performs Francis Poulenc’s delightful Concert Champêtre, with Paul Jackson as piano soloist. Also included in the concert are Symphony No 2 by Ruth Gipps, and Holst’s Suite de Ballet.

Haslingfield Choir and Orchestra: Spring Concert
2027-03-20 19:30 - 21:30 | All Saints’ Church, Church Way, Haslingfield, CB23 1JF
Haslingfield Choir and Orchestra, conducted by Paul Jackson, present their spring concert.
