Nicholas Mulroy returns to Kings Place, alongside resident orchestra Aurora, for a vibrant programme ranging from Bach to Monteverdi and Purcell to Silvio Rodríguez.

If the singer falls silent, so too does life, for life itself is all a song. Mercedes Sosa’s 1973 ballad Si se calla el cantor speaks to the profound importance of song in 20th-century Latin America. Singers like Sosa, along with Victor Jara in Chile and Silvio Rodríguez in Cuba, became national icons with their music and lyrics of politics, love and the human condition.

This event offers a rare chance for a London audience to hear songs cherished by Latin American communities across the globe as the musical counterparts of literature by Garcia Márquez, Allende, Borges and Neruda.  Curated with tenor Nicholas Mulroy as part of the Voices Unwrapped series, the programme draws connections between these Latin American works and the European Baroque songwriting in which their roots partly lie.

Celebrated for his radiant sound and compelling interpretation in repertoire from Bach to Britten, Mulroy is one of the UK’s most versatile and insightful singers. Known most widely for his sublime readings of Baroque repertoire, as a linguist he has also had a lifelong fascination with Latin American song.

Mulroy writes: ‘Placing gems of the 20th-century Latin American songbook alongside works by Bach, Purcell and Monteverdi allows us to see clearly how these songs share not only harmonic and structural foundations, but also themes of love, power, faith, and the poetic imagination.  Together they form an exquisitely eloquent alternative perspective of what it is to be most intensely human and alive.’

The 20th-century Latin American songs in this programme have been specially arranged for voice and mixed ensemble by Aurora Arranger-in-Residence Iain Farrington.