The Swingles kick off the festive season with an intimate hometown Christmas show at St. James Church, Islington, on Friday 21st December. The five-time Grammy award winning group will perform a range of folk and jazz-inspired originals in addition to traditional holiday favourites.
This special holiday concert follows a “performance of great passion and elan” (The Guardian) with Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra earlier in the month, where the group sang Berio’s Sinfonia – originally written for the original Swingle Singers.
In his five-star review for the Arts Desk, critic Gavin Dixon is full of praise for both Jurowski and the Swingles, writing: “Sinfonia can work in mediocre performance; all the orchestral fireworks and clever quotations in the third movement can speak for themselves. But Jurowski took the work to a higher plane. The Swingles sing almost continuously throughout, and here brought their trademark bravado and sass. But Jurowski matched them, with sleek, dynamic strings, and efficient, incisive brass… For an encore, more Swingles, and back to their core repertoire with Piazzolla’s Libertango – delicious!”
