Week 03 2024

The Choir of Westminster Cathedral is world famous for its staple of plainsong and polyphony. The choir explores a wealth of music from this repertoire for the richest of liturgical seasons: Holy Week. Masterpieces of the Renaissance by William Byrd and Tomás Luis de Victoria are woven together with ancient Gregorian chants, including Pange lingua and Adoro te, and later penitential works by Anton Bruckner and Maurice Duruflé. Three of the Cathedral’s illustrious Masters of Music, all of whom have contributed to the Church’s treasury of liturgical music, are also represented. The sequence culminates in a setting of Saint John Henry Newman’s poem Praise to the Holiest in the height by Sir Richard Runciman Terry, the Cathedral’s pioneering Master of Music.

Dame Vera Margaret Lynn (eng. Dame Vera Margaret Lynn, nee. Welch (English Welch); March 20, 1917 — June 18, 2020) was an English singer, Dame of the Order of the British Empire (Officer, OBE, 1949, Dame Commander, DBE, 1975), who had great popularity during the Second World War, when she hosted the BBC concert radio program "Sincerely Yours", addressed to to British servicemen abroad.

Anyone who has ever seen the Dead can testify that one of its shows will add quite a bit of color to the environment here at Stanford. Anyone who has not seen one of these spectacles should have the opportunity to do so. The Grateful Dead are an important part of the Bay Area's cultural history. Those of us who saw them last week can testify that the Dead are alive and well. The Concert Network would be hard-pressed to find an act which would bring Frost Amphitheatre to life as the Dead would. - The Stanford Daily

When Mike Smith appears in public, he usually does so in the image of his character "Bubbles".

When Mike Smith appears in public, he usually does so in the image of his character "Bubbles".

One of the greatest stars of the rock & roll era, Elton John exploded like a supernova in the early 1970s and sustained a career that kept him at the top of the charts for the next five decades. He had a Billboard Top 40 hit single every year between 1970 and 1996, a sign that he knew how to both change with the times and mold the times to fit him. John's earliest records were part of the moody, introspective post-'60s singer/songwriter movement, but once he had a hit with "Your Song," the pianist revealed he could also craft Beatles-like pop and pound out rockers with equal aplomb. As "Rocket Man," "Crocodile Rock," "Daniel," "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," and "Bennie and the Jets" – songs John wrote with his lifelong collaborator Bernie Taupin – climbed into the Top Ten on either side of the Atlantic, John was inescapable during the first half of the '70s. His versatility, combined with his effortless melodic skills, and flamboyant stage shows, became his calling cards, sustaining him through shifts in fame and fortune. Eventually, John reached outside of pop music, writing songs for Disney's The Lion King and collaborating with Tim Rice on Aida, yet he never abandoned the form: during the 2010s and 2020s, he balanced fashionable collaborations with emerging stars with albums that hearkened back to his moody records of the early '70s. In 2024, he joined the elite group of EGOT winners after earning an Emmy Award for his concert special Elton John Live: Farewell from Dodger Stadium.