Patricia Hammond

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to release a Renaissance CD, but here’s the first! It contains a lot of Campion, not only a composer but also poet – and physician! The CD contains a catchy Broadside Ballad, and a very folky number as well as Dowland’s sexy morbid hit, In Darkness Let Me Dwell.
And some interesting instrumentals performed by William Summers and Stephen Carpenter, the former playing a flute made out of pear-tree wood and a boxwood descant recorder, and the latter a 7 course lute by Paul Thomson and a 5-course Renaissance guitar by Peter Forrester, which weighs about as much as a ukulele.
Anyway, you can buy it on Big Cartel! HERE.

And here is a sampling so you know what it all sounds like:

The new year is filling up…there will be a project with the Museum of Vancouver for Canada’s 150th birthday, many projects to do with the hundredth anniversary of America’s joining the First World War, a Wilton’s Music Hall date, a tour of Guernsey, and even better, I’ll be in Southport on the 18th of January for Midweek Music! I love that series, and especially the lady who runs it, marvellous Angela, my partner-in-crime for the legendary 2006 tour of North Wales, never forgotten. The people who attend Midweek Music are wonderful. True music-lovers. Last time, I sold out of CDs and about six people gave me money and trusted me to send them the CDs later, which is almost unheard-of. Hoping to visit the Lawnmower Museum while there.

Here is a photo from the concert at Valence House where we performed songs from the Crimean War. I tried to get the dress as right as I could without bankrupting myself, but the length is a bit short, made to appear shorter by the LATE Victorian high heels: I did have some black velvety flat slippers as they would have worn in the 1850s, I carefully chose them in Brussels a year ago, but I left them outside for a few minutes and the foxes stole them! When I found them, one in a neighbour’s yard and one a block away, they’d been chewed beyond usefulness. Matt as always looks perfect.

There will be Bach, WW1 Cabaret, Victorian Christmas cheer and some rare songs from the Crimean war in November!

And Songs of the Great War is now carried at Foyles on Charing Cross Road, so all those who distrust Paypal have another alternative, and a jolly lovely one at that. It is a GORGEOUS bookshop with one of the last proper Classical CD departments in London. VERY nice review (CLICK HERE to read it) from the Western Front Association!

Back to the gigs. First of all the Bach Collective celebrates forty years of Bach in the City of London, started by Peter Lea-Cox in 1976. I actually sang under Lea-Cox just before he retired, when I first came to London (NOT in 1976!), and he wrote his own settings under the name “Lecosaldi” which I always thought very clever! On Remembrance Day and Sunday evening we will be doing Cantatas 61 and 62, rather upbeat works, and very different from my Remembrance Day musical activities of the last five years!

And at 4 Princelet Street, a staggeringly atmospheric venue in Spitalfields, there will be a really marvellous event, on the 19th. The fabulously reasonably-priced ticket will get you a drink, egg and chips, a film, a talk, and a 1910s WW1 Cabaret with me plus Matt plus as many instruments as he can pack into the space. It will be lit entirely by beeswax candles, so I’m told, so it will smell gorgeous as well. Very limited number of tickets available due to the intimacy of the space, so if you’re at all interested, do not delay! Tickets HERE.

On the 17th, two days before, we will be at Gloucester Quays for their Christmas Market, performing the completely authentic Victorian stuff we’re famed for…here’s a video of last year’s:

This year I have the same dress in red! Speaking of red, we did a very special event at the Whitgift “Remembering 1916” exhibition…the descendants of the Red Baron, Freiherr and Freifrau von Richthoven, came along to meet descendants of the first Britons the Baron shot down, that very day a hundred years earlier. Together they drank Schnapps and ate a three-course meal in the exhibition itself, as Matt and I performed Roses of Picardy in German and English, and many other 1910s songs. Toward the end of the evening, Freifrau Elisabeth von Richthoven asked us for “something modern”, Ebony and Ivory to be specific! Luckily Matt knows every song ever written and played it on the 1910s Pleyel. Frieherr Donat von Richthoven had red-rimmed glasses, and I wore a red dress.

This exhibition has been extended until April, thank goodness. It is brilliant.

And we seem to be the go-to people for wars, as we have dug out some Broadside Ballads for the conclusion of Valence House’s Sebastopol Project. So come on out to Dagenham to hear “Come all you gallant Britons bold, Huzzah my boys, Huzzah!” Real Flashman stuff.

The Renaissance CD will be out before Christmas, by maybe a couple of weeks! Anyone buying CDs from me knows, however, that I do not delay getting things out to you. I am very diligent in that regard! No time is wasted. Please do take a look at the YouTube page as I upload new things as often as I can. The latest is the footage from the opening of the Remembering 1916 exhibition at Whitgift, featuring the wonderful and enormously talented Simon Lane at the Fazioli. This version of Roses of Picardy is in English only. Next time I upload the song I hope it will be in the German-English version, or the French one I found at the Somme!