Europe Day concert from Smith Square – join here for this online performance

You are warmly invited to enjoy the European Parliament Liaison Office’s Europe Day Concert  which will be broadcast from St John’s Smith Square on Sunday 9 May at 12pm.

This event has now passed

Current government guidelines prevent the European Parliament from welcoming guests including  representatives from New Europeans UK to St John’s in person. 

The good news is that we can invite you to enjoy the concert virtually together with your friends, family and anyone else to whom you would like to extend our invitation! The theme of the concert is ‘Journeys’, both earthbound and spiritual. 

Jeremy Sullivan from the European Parliament office explains:  

“Top Portuguese lyric tenor Luis Gomes takes us from ‘Inferno’ – the word which begins an aria from Verdi’s opera Simon Boccanegra  about the seafaring Genovese people – to ‘Purgatorio’ in the possibility of exile envisaged by Benjamin Godard’s  Dante in an operatic rarity of 1890, and finally heavenwards with da Gama’s ‘O paradis’ in Meyerbeer’s  L’Africaine. 

A train ride is succinctly and humorously etched in a Johann Strauss polka, and locomotive loving Dvořák evokes the other side of the pond in the finale of his Ninth Symphony, ‘From the New World’. 

The outstanding performances of Jonathan Bloxham and his  Northern Chords Festival Orchestra  of young and established professionals in the past three Europe Day Concerts guarantee a concert of the highest order.

This year the European Parliament is partnering with the Embassy of Portugal in the UK,  the Camōes Institute and the Delegation of the European Union in the UK.”