London Pro Musica Choir

Artistic Director’s 2025-26 Season Message

Dear Friends,

Last year at this time, we were looking ahead to a season of maintaining our growth: growth in membership, enthusiasm, reputation, and all while creating beautiful music for appreciative audiences. We have done exceedingly well in all these areas. I urge each of you to share the good work and music London Pro Musica embodies with family, friends, and colleagues. Encourage fellow musicians to audition, non-singers to consider attending and volunteering, and seek out advertisers and sponsors for our fine ensemble. Our choir is only as strong as our enthusiasm for it.

I am very excited to share with you some of what LPMC’s 2025/2026 season, Beginnings, features music both old and new that will inspire action and celebrate the past while addressing the challenges and potential of our present world.

The season launches with London composer Oliver Whitehead’s Mass for All Creatures. This exuberant work celebrates the beauty and fragility of all life, especially the animals that live alongside us. Additionally, new scores are being created to allow the work to be shared across Canada, a new movement to the Mass has been written by the composer for the occasion, and a representative recording will also be created.

Our second concert of the season, Texture, celebrates the music and influence of 16th century Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. The program features Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli: an intricate, exquisite work written in defiance of a papal edict demanding that all sacred music be simple and stark. Our program will celebrate this work and incorporate works by German composer Anton Bruckner. Bruckner lived 300 years later, yet his music rings with the old master’s influence and style. With this unadorned, a cappella program, we, like Palestrina, stand in defiant defense of the necessity of beauty in dark times.

2025 closes with two performances of an LPMC favourite, Handel’s Messiah. As in previous years, we will collaborate with the community on a Sing-Along Messiah at First-St. Andrew’s United Church and will feature strings and soloists from the London area. Then we will perform a Messiah Highlights concert in St. Marys on Saturday, December 13, 2:00 pm. And finally, we will wrap-up 2025 with our own performance of Messiah, featuring professional soloists and strings at our home venue of St. James Westminster Church in Wortley Village. This is an audience favourite, and we are thrilled to be bringing it back as part of our 2025/2026 season.

In the new year, we’ll embark on our next Common Ground program, Brahms’ A German Requiem (Op. 45). This large, sweeping work for soloists and chorus comes in an arrangement written by the composer for and for one piano, 4-hands. My intention is to utilize this beautiful arrangement which will allow us to easily take this program to Stratford, building new relationships with audiences there.

Finally, a large-scale collaboration to end our season: Water: An Environmental Oratorio by Ontario composer Stephanie Martin; excerpts of which we performed at our Green Cathedral concert last season. London Pro Musica Choir is excited to partner with Chor Amica and Music at First-St. Andrew’s Church to present the London premiere of this monumental new work for choir, children’s choir, and orchestra. The work tells the story of a smalltown grappling with decisions around climate change and water protection.

I am humbled to be the Artistic Director of this great choir and look forward to all we will accomplish together in the 2025/2026 season.

With deepest thanks for your continued support,

Paul Grambo, Artistic Director