A RENOWNED LGBTQ+ choir is to give its first performance in a cathedral on Saturday in a concert held to mark the start of Pride month.
The Fourth Choir, which has performed in the BBC Proms, the Barbican, the Wigmore Hall, Shakespeare’s Globe, on BBC Radio 3, and in various churches in central London, is to sing in Southwark Cathedral.
The Precentor, Canon Kathryn Fleming, issued the invitation after hearing them perform a few months ago.
They will present a programme, “A Requiem for Those Who Had None”, which will commemorate “thousands of people all over Europe who were sentenced to death for being in queer relationships” between the 12th and 19th centuries.
Kathleen HolmanThe Fouth Choir performs in Farm Street Church, London
Central to the programme is the Requiem by the Spanish Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. Its movements are interspersed with excerpts from the book James and John by Sir Chris Bryant MP (Books, 16 February 2024), read by the author. The book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in the UK. They were arrested in Southwark in 1835 and hanged publicly at Newgate Prison later that year.
The choir will also sing a setting of the Lamentations by Dominique Phinot, an accomplished Franco-Flemish composer executed in 1556 for “homosexual practices” (Arts, 29 May), according to a contemporaneous account by the polymath Gerolamo Cardano. The choir will also sing music by the recently rediscovered Italian nun Raffaella Aleotti (c.1575-post 1620) (Feature, 18 July 2025), and the contemporary New York-based trans composer Michael Bussewitz-Quarm.
The Dean of Southwark, the Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley, said: “It’s easy to forget that, for many years, LGBT people in this country and across Europe were executed for their identity, who they were, and who they loved.”
The concert, he said, was “not just a historical act of remembrance”. “Although killing the body has ended in the UK, what continued — and I think still continues, sadly, in parts of the Church — is that the soul is still being killed by shame, by shaming people.”
Dr Oakley said that he wanted members of the LGBT community “to know that Southwark Cathedral is trying to journey alongside them, and that means remembering the past and also trying to change the future”.
thefourthchoir.com