OUT OF THE SHADOWS an evening of music for LGBT History Month in London

As part of the LGBT History Month in 2023, Robert Hugill presents Out of the Shadows, a recital featuring pianist Nigel Foster (artistic director of the London Song Festival), tenor Ben Vonberg-Clark, and baritone James Atkinson in the world premiere of Hugill’s cantatas Out of the Shadows and Et expecto resurrectionem.  Alongside these two will be a selection of Hugill’s songs, from love songs and settings of Michaelangelo’s sonnets to a depiction of an AIDS candlelit memorial in Memorare.

Out of the Shadows charts the emergence of gay men during the 19th century, and their gain in confidence at being present and part of society. Taking in solos for tenor and for baritone, along with duets, the cycle moves from tentative admissions, setting texts from Carl Pontus Wikner’s Psychological Confessions and Friedrich van Ramdohr’s Venus Urania, through Joe Ackerley’s description of cruising in a hostile climate from My Father and Myself and Mikhail Kuzmin’s more comic description of a Russian bath house visit, to Walt Whitman’s unashamed declaration of same-sex attraction in To What you Said.

Bringing the story more up to date, the evening will also include Hugill’s song Memorare from his 1998 cycle Songs of Love and Loss, setting M.V. Lively’s poetic description of an AIDS candlelit memorial. There are also love-songs, both the complexities of settings of John Addington Symonds’ translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets and the more direct experience of the 20th century Black American poet Carl Cook.

Et Expecto Resurrectionem looks at more general ideas of life after death. Written as a continuous sequence for tenor, baritone and piano it begins with the Latin affirmation of the Resurrection from the Creed, and then works through ideas of Cryogenics, the 18th-century grave-robbing of Burke and Hare, and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, ending in a landscape full of Walt Whitman’s homo-erotic pantheistic transcendentalism.

Two songs from Songs of Love and Loss: The Dead Poet, Soft for Music Dies

Et Expecto Resurrectionem – cantata for tenor, baritone & piano

Summer Rain

For David on his Birthday: 3 – To see you happy, 7 – perhaps

Michelangelo Sonnets: Sonnet 31 – Love’s Lordship, Sonnet 32 – Love’s Expostulation

Out of the Shadows – cantata for tenor, baritone & piano

Memorare (from Songs of Love and Loss)