The acclaimed Piatti Quartet are joined in Shostakovich’s epic Piano Quintet by rising British star Thomas Luke.  Shostakovich died in 1975 and is one of our featured anniversary composers this year.  The programme also includes Barber’s haunting Adagio and the lyrical Mendelssohn Quartet in A minor. - Richard Sisson (Chair of Luton Music)

Wednesday 12th March 1.30pm

Peter Bussereau violin Jacqueline Phillips cello

Mozart Duo in G, Schindler's List by John Williams

with music by Kodaly and Gliere

Retiring Collection, Complimentary post-concert tea and biscuits.

Join the St Mary's Church men's group for a delicious curry evening!

Date: Tuesday, 25th February Time: 7:00 PM Location: Red Chilli, Wellington Street

A chance to get together as men, have a banter and enjoy good food.
Please SIGN UP so we know how many people to book for.

For more information, please see Clive.

Everyone welcome - pay on the day.

Tuesdays are Banquet nights, so 1 starter, 1 main course, 1 side dish, 1 pilau rice / naan and coffe is £15 (plus drinks / poppadoms)

Please Click Here for the menu

Wednesday 19th February 1.30pm

Peter Bussereau violin Yukiko Usedo piano

Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending

Kreisler Praeludium and Allegro, Richard Strauss Sonata

Retiring Collection, Complimentary post-concert tea and biscuits.

Join us in prayer for the life of our church. What is Jesus saying to us for 2025?

‘… And Jesus Himself Draw Near.’ - Luke 24:15

TODAY’s Prayers is a video of Anne leading prayers that can be watched whenever you like.

For more information, please email ulrikehunt@stmarysluton.org or contact Anne Adams.

Click below for the video.

Join us in prayer for the life of our church. What is Jesus saying to us for 2025?

‘… And Jesus Himself Draw Near.’ - Luke 24:15

TODAY’s Meeting is at the Church with Deeper Impact, Our Youth Bible Study group.

For more information, please email ulrikehunt@stmarysluton.org or contact Anne Adams.

Join us in prayer for the life of our church. What is Jesus saying to us for 2025?

‘… And Jesus Himself Draw Near.’ - Luke 24:15

TODAY’s Meeting is at the Church during Welcome Wednesday.

For more information, please email ulrikehunt@stmarysluton.org or contact Anne Adams.

Join us in prayer for the life of our church. What is Jesus saying to us for 2025?

‘… And Jesus Himself Draw Near.’ - Luke 24:15

TODAY’s Meeting is on Zoom. To get the zoom link please email ulrikehunt@stmarysluton.org or contact Anne Adams.

Join us in prayer for the life of our church. What is Jesus saying to us for 2025?

‘… And Jesus Himself Draw Near.’ - Luke 24:15

TODAY’s Meeting is on Zoom. To get the zoom link please email ulrikehunt@stmarysluton.org or contact Anne Adams.

Games, activities, and exhibitions inspired by Medieval England. 
A Fun day for all the whole community
Everyone is welcome

Join us for a fun and engaging fundraising quiz night to support Peter Hunt’s DTS Program in Australia! Test your knowledge across a variety of topics and compete with friends and family for prizes. There will also be a raffle.

Bring your own snacks and soft drinks will be provided. If you would like an alcoholic drink, please bring it with you.

To sign up please click the button below or let Peter Hunt know you are coming and paying cash on the door.

MERRY CHRISTMAS from the St Mary’s Team!

Join us to sing carols around the piano in a light hearted service during Welcome Wednesday.

St Mary’s Annual Carol Service. Join us for some festive fun as we walk the journey to Jesus’ Birth.

Want to go on a Christmas experience, join us for an introduction to why we sing Carols in the Christian Faith.

We end the season with the unique talents of Kosmos. The chief music critic of The Times, Richard Morrison, has described them with these words:

‘..telepathic rapport, dazzling virtuosity, serious scholarship, intellectual curiosity and impeccable musicianship. I defy you not to be mesmerised.’

The members of Kosmos have travelled extensively, performing with musicians all over the world, as well as within the broad multiculturalism of London’s music scene. They have collectively studied music from North Africa, the Middle East, Jewish, Balkan and Gypsy music, Argentine tango, flamenco, Celtic and jazz traditions as well as contemporary classical music. They combine all their knowledge with a respect for their own Western classical music training, performing freely with panache, innovation and creativity, incorporating improvisation into their own unique arrangements and compositions. With such pluralist refinement their approach is an embodiment of cross-cultural fusion and as such will be a perfect final exploration of our season’s theme of The Relationship between Literature, Art & Music.

As the season ends there will be an air of general celebration for another year of remarkable musical achievement. It may well involve mince pies and mulled wine – everyone will be most welcome.

Richard Sisson (Chair of Luton Music)

Our annual Christmas carol service with the Salvation Army. There is no Children’s or Youth provisions as it is a family service.

This much admired wind ensemble return to Luton with a programme particularly featuring Stephen Dodgson’s Promenade No.2. Stephen was for many years associated with Luton Music, generously giving his time to serve as a Vice-president. 2024 is the centenary of his birth and it is an honour to programme this fine piece in his memory. We are most grateful to the Dodgson Charitable Trust for their support with this event.

Richard Sisson (Chair of Luton Music)

This programme has been drawn from the repertoire which the Solem Quartet have recently recorded on their latest CD Painted Light. That project broadly explored the idea of ‘colour’ in music. The quartet is perhaps inviting the listener to consider whether for example the intense ‘colours’ of music written at the time of the French Impressionist art movement might well be correlated to that aesthetic. This music by the Boulanger sisters and Debussy make a very convincing case…

As in the Maja Ratkje piece from earlier in the season, Edmund Finnis’s String Quartet Devotions is inspired by Beethoven. In his late Op 132 quartet the third movement was written while the ailing viennese composer was convalescing at Baden after a serious illness in 1824-25. He wrote the slow movement entitled Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart as a hymn of thanks to God for his recovery, praising his reawakened life. Edmund Finnis has used this profoundly uplifting movement as the inspiration for Devotions.

As we consider throughout the year’s season The Relationship between Literature, Art & Music, it is fascinating to get a glimpse of how often composers find their inspiration in other works of art. Notwithstanding such glorious synergies, we are as a result then reminded how music still achieves these things in an incontrovertibly unique way. Although its genesis may often be rooted in the world that surrounds it, yet its individuality and power is so very singular.

Richard Sisson (Chair of Luton Music)

We want to celebrate the light of Jesus in a dark world - what better time to do it than on Halloween night, with its focus on death and darkness. 

Come and join us for our LIGHT NIGHT, Thursday 31st October 2024
4:30 pm - 6:30 pm at St Mary's Church hall

We will be celebrating the light of Jesus in a dark world.
There will be activities for the whole family.
We will have hot dogs together (vegan hot dogs / gluten free rolls will be an option) - please let us know your dietary requirements in the notes section of the sign up.

The cost is child ticket £1.50 per person ,Adult ticket £2.00 per person including children aged 3+.
Please sign up every person from your family who is coming.

It is always a pleasure to welcome Leon McCawley back to Luton Music. We have enjoyed remarkable recitals from him over the last five years and this programme of Romantic piano music promises to be another such memorable occasion.

Although Schumann’s 2nd Piano Sonata is essentially musical in its discourse, it does have a resonance with our season’s theme of The Relationship between Literature, Art & Music in that the slow movement is based on a setting that Schumann had made of a poem by Justinus Kerner – Im Herbste.

Be off with you, O sun,
Hurry away from here!
So that she might be warmed
By only me!

Wither, flowers, O wither!
Hush now, little birds!
That only I might sing to her
And bloom in doing so.

 Woven into the poetically inspired melodic invention of this movement (and indeed in many other places in the work) is the composer’s motto theme for his beloved wife Clara. She was his greatest muse and this is another of his works that bears testimony to his unswerving devotion to her.

Richard Sisson (Chair of Luton Music)

Beethoven Sonata for violin and piano in G major Op30 No3

Faure Sonata for violin and piano No1 in A major

Peter Bussereau- violin

Yukiko Osedo piano

A one-hour concert followed by tea and biscuits

Retiring collection

For further details email: bussereau@icloud.com

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This programme was prompted by the theme of this current season, The Relationship between Literature, Art & Music. In the early 80s I was commissioned to write a score for The Royal Ballet of New Zealand. The work was to be based on a short story by the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield. Before sending the score off to be choreographed on the other side of the world, I was anxious to check that musically everything was in order, so I organised a concert in London to try out the music.

This was the first professional concert I had curated and played in and it is nostalgic for me to re-visit it some 40 years later. The concert opens with a Mozart sonata that I was studying at the time with my teachers, Irene Kohler and James Gibb. The short story, Bliss, is then read aloud by Joanna David. It was Joanna who read it for that first concert all those years ago and it is such a pleasure now to welcome her back to Luton. After the interval we will then hear how the music for this score has interpreted the narrative of Bliss. It is scored for clarinet, string trio, double bass and piano. For the concert I have invited performers all of whom I have met over the many happy years I have spent helping to organise concerts here in the town. It has been such an interesting project for me to look again at the music after 40 years and to work on preparing it with such fine musicians and friends. I hope you too will all enjoy this special evening.

Richard Sisson (Chair of Luton Music)

Ben Goldscheider

It is always a pleasure to welcome Ben Goldscheider back to Luton. He has been playing for us since 2015 and it has been so exciting to witness his remarkable success over the last ten years. He returns on this occasion with one of the country’s finest chamber ensembles, the Heath Quartet, playing Mozart’s ever popular Horn Quintet written for the composer’s great friend, the cheesemonger Joseph Leutgeb.

Heath Quartet

If we are searching for connections with our season’s theme of The Relationship between Literature, Art & Music, then perhaps Eleanor Alberga’s The Shining Gate of Morpheus will have the richest resonance. It is one of a series of nocturnal chamber pieces that this Jamaica-born composer began some 20 years ago. She enjoyed a period as music director of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre and there is no doubting the influence of wider artistic synergy in her compositions – dance works, theatre pieces, song settings and other programmatic works inspired by literature.

The concert ends with York Bowen’s sweeping essay in full blown Romantic chamber music. Arguably out of kilter with his time, Bowen was an unapologetic Romantic; with the benefit of historical perspective it is perhaps easier for us today to respond to his full blown chromatic harmony and overtly dramatic style – we no longer need to make allowance for any such harmless retrospective tendencies.

Richard Sisson (Chair of Luton Music)

The Delphine Trio played for us here in Luton for the first time in May last year and it was immediately clear that the audience would be delighted if they were to return. So here they are in a programme that neatly engages with our season’s theme of The Relationship between Literature, Art & Music.

The Ireland trio is a fascinating work evolving in three incarnations over a number of years. There is no direct association with specific literature but the composer’s love of the written word (the fantasies of Arthur Machen and the Satyricon of Petronius, for example) was always an indirect influence on his musical aesthetic. Per Nørgård’s Spell explores a gentle play on words, suggesting how the letters of the notes are spelled out into the shapes that cast the magical spell of the music – the alchemy of the language itself.

The Beethoven trio is sometimes known as the Gassenhauer Trio. This arose from its third movement which contains nine variations on a theme from Joseph Weigl’s then popular L’amor marinaro ossia Il corsaro. The melody, Pria ch’io l’impegno (Before I go to work), was so popular it could be heard in many of Vienna’s lanes (Gasse in German). A Gassenhauer therefore usually denotes a simple tune that many people (in the Gassen) have taken up, whistling and singing it as they go about their lives.

Daniel Schnyder’s A Friday Night in August is a splendidly atmospheric piece, synergising the metropolitan vibe of 90s Manhattan echoing to the open-air sounds of the Caribbean. Meanwhile the Juon which closes the concert is a straightforward portrait of nymphs and satyrs taken from the pages of Classical mythology. I hope you’ll enjoy this wonderfully varied programmatic feast!

Richard Sisson (Chair of Luton Music)