The Tuesday just passed, I took myself into central London for a treat. A few months ago, I’d seen an ad on Instagram for an upcoming concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields, a beautiful 18th-century Anglican church that regularly hosts a lineup of classical concerts. “Night Flight” promised an hour-long programme of choral music exploring the night, performed by the church’s home choral ensemble, St Martin’s Voices, with accompaniment by Gabriella Swallow on cello.

It had finally turned properly cold this week – the type of chill we Londoners expect in November – but an earlier rain had cleared off and the sun set early, leaving the pavements wet and shop windows glinting with recently hung holiday cheer. I brushed past the Christmas market in Trafalgar Square (Christmas markets are a December-only activity for me – I think it keeps the season special if it’s shorter), ducked across the street and climbed the steps into the portal at St Martin. From there, you can see all of Trafalgar Square and, in the winter, with the leaves fallen, the view stretches down towards Whitehall, Downing Street and Big Ben.

Inside, God or the church administrators had turned up the heating, somehow miraculously making the stone interior warm and cosy. The ticket for the concert was only £10 and I always hire a seat cushion – partly because the wooden pews are hard on the tailbone, and partly because it’s nice to support the work St Martin does, which includes programmes for the unhoused, a centre for the Chinese immigrant community and generally being a leading voice in global humanitarian issues (you know, actual Christ-ian charity).

The performers at St Martin are world-class and regularly release albums, and I think it must be the best-value concert in all of London. It was also half-empty, and I’d like to encourage any visitor to London to add a concert at St Martin-in-the-Fields to their itinerary.

Director of Music Andrew Earis introduced “Night Flight”, which featured 13 works of choral music from various eras, designed to lead the listener through the night from sunset through the late, drowsy hours, then into dreams and finally waking again with the sun’s return.

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The opening work was “Nightfall”, a Sara Teasdale poem set to a choral arrangement by Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds; it brought me instantly to tears, as live music seems to do lately. I was also moved by the concert’s titular work, “Night Flight” by British composer Cecilia McDowall, who was in the audience and stood to introduce the work, which she said was written to mark the centenary of the first female pilot, Harriet Quimby’s, flight across the English Channel in 1912 – a forgotten feat due to its proximity in time to the sinking of the Titanic. And my favourite of the evening was “Today” by a 27-year-old composer from Cambridge University, Lucy Walker, who is also St Martin’s Voices’ composer-in-residence. Its glorious, soaring melody beckons us from darkness back to light at sunrise:

As the day keeps unveiling all her grandeur
Let the chains of yesterday break away;
Today is here, I will not cling to yesterday.

Below, I have provided the concert’s song list as well as the opening Sara Teasdale poem in full (it is public domain), and a couple of my favourite songs that I was able to find online.

“Night Flight” was a beautiful reminder of how important the night is, not just as a physical ecosystem for living things, but as an artistic space that has inspired humans to rest, dream, sing, write and paint for all of human history.

Nightfall

We will never walk again
As we used to walk at night,
Watching our shadows lengthen
Under the gold street-light
When the snow was new and white.
We will never walk again
Slowly, we two,
In spring when the park is sweet
With midnight and with dew,
And the passers-by are few.
I sit and think of it all,
And the blue June twilight dies, —
Down in the clanging square
A street-piano cries
And stars come out in the skies.

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)