December is here, and having in the past written a few brief Christmas-adjacent choral numbers, I've been getting news of numerous carol concerts happening everywhere. The repertoire is often surprisingly imaginative, and it delights me yearly that choirs of all kinds are still up for this - and their audiences too.   A handful that I'll be going to around London illustrate the considerable range of this seasonal "artform". On Thursday 11th December in Conway Hall, Electric

I am presently en route to Warsaw for a short residency at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music . I hope to post more later about my visit. There will be a generously programmed concert of six of my chamber pieces ( Monday 24th November, 19.00 in UMFC's Concert Hall) followed on Tuesday morning (25th, 10am) by a composition workshop. I'll be discussing some impressive scores by UMFC's student composers. Thanks in advance to UMFC for this interesting invitation.   PICTURED

It's a particular composer's pleasure to hear one of your old pieces sounding much more coherent (or having whatever else it lacked before) than you previously remembered. For me that was the case today at the St Cecilia Festival in Westminster Abbey, where Andrew Nethsingha directed Praise Him With Trumpets with the choirs of Westminster and St Paul's Cathedrals plus Westminster Abbey and (my impression) achieved a luxurious balance of voices, trumpets and organ sounds.   T