Rufus Frowde & Anthony Brown

This concert is part of a plan to make a recording of new choral music by myself and Rufus Frowde, another locally based musician.  Before being appointed to his present role as Organist and Assistant Director of Music at the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace, Rufus was the Organ Scholar at Merton College, Oxford.  As a part of that College’s 750th anniversary celebrations in 2014, I had been commissioned to write a new anthem, a setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Pied Beauty.  In turn John Booth, an alumnus of the College, then further commissioned me to write a Folk Mass for St Nicholas in Arundel.  These two works are unusual for their combination of saxophone with the more usual liturgical forces of choir and organ and are being presented together this evening for the very first time.  The concert also features a range of Rufus’s own recent choral and instrumental music, variously commissioned by members of our thriving musical community here in Beds and Herts.  The material is to be recorded in 2023 and will benefit enormously from being prepared for a live performance here in the beautiful setting of St Mary’s Church, Luton.

This project is being generously supported by the John Booth Charitable Foundation.

Richard Sisson  (Chairman of Luton Music)