Fulham Camerata New Music Director Takes the Choir From Brahms to Blake in One November Evening
Gabriella Noble has not yet conducted a single public concert with Fulham Camerata, and her first will trace an entire day, dawn to dusk, in four centuries of choral music. The 45-strong Fulham choir takes to All Saints Church on Saturday 14 November at 6.30pm for The Closing of the Day, a programme built around the arc of light fading into evening, and it marks Noble’s debut as the choir’s music director.
The programme opens with Johannes Brahms’ Volkslieder, his settings of German folk song, before moving into Arthur Sullivan’s The Long Day Closes. From there it turns to two works by Judith Weir, who in 2014 became the first woman appointed Master of the Queen’s Music, a post she held until 2024. The choir will perform Vertue, Weir’s 2005 setting of three George Herbert poems, written in memory of a friend and supporter of the Spitalfields Festival, where it was first performed that June by The Cardinall’s Musick under Andrew Carwood.
The evening’s structural hinge is Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien, composed in 1636 for the funeral of Heinrich Posthumus von Reuss, a German prince and personal friend of the composer. It is widely regarded as the first requiem written in the German language, and Brahms is thought to have owned a copy of the score: the resemblance between Schütz’s funeral music and Brahms’ own German Requiem, written more than two centuries later, has been noted by musicologists ever since. Geraldine Cooper of Fulham Camerata describes the Schütz as “an intimately moving work that would later influence Brahms’ own music,” a connection that gives the evening’s four-century span an internal logic rather than a simple chronological tour.
“Our November programme brings together four composers writing across four centuries, united by themes of reflection, mortality, faith and consolation,” Cooper says. “Each composer offers a different response to endings and what endures beyond them.”
The concert closes with Weir again, this time her 1997 carol My Guardian Angel, a brief setting of a William Blake text originally written for Christmas performance at Spitalfields, built around a simple “alleluia” that the composer intended the audience to sing alongside the choir. This is not Fulham Camerata’s first outing this year with music written for grief and remembrance, having performed Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil earlier in 2026. Cooper frames the closing moment as the evening’s real destination: “There is an invitation for audience and choir to sing together, bringing our journey from dawn to dusk to a shared conclusion.”
Tickets are £20 for general admission and £15 for students and under-25s, though Fulham Camerata’s own website currently lists a lower earlybird rate of £15 and £10 respectively for a limited period, available through the choir’s website.
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