Small Performing Arts Event of the Year 2023

(Seventh Annual Greater London Enterprise Awards)

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Women Immigrants and Refugees in Britain - Friday 20th March, 7pm
Katy Thomson and Siân Dicker - soprano
Lily Mo Browne - mezzo-soprano
Nigel Foster - piano
Rekha John-Cheriyan - speaker

This concert, postponed from 7th November 2025, is a tribute to the women who have come to this country as immigrants and refugees since 1945, and an acknowledgement of the huge contribution they have made and continue to make to British life. Some of their stories are told in their own words, read by Rekha John-Cheriyan, and these stories are illustrated by songs, all settings of poems written by women, by H Leslie Adams, Ernest Bloch, Elgar, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Libby Larsen, Lori Laitman, Wagner, Rachmaninov, Charles Ives, Jake Heggie, Lee Hoiby, Shirley Thompson and Raymond Yiu.

Katy Thomson was was a Britten Pears Young Artist (2021-2022), a Garsington Opera Alvarez Young Artist (2021 & 2022) and an Oxford Song Young Artist (2022-2023). She has sung roles with English National Opera, Scottish Opera.
Siân Dicker won the Singers Prize in the 2020 Royal Over-Seas League Competition as well as the Oxford Lieder Young Artist Platform. She is a City Music Foundation Artist, a 2020/21 Britten Pears Young Artist and was listed in the BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Rising Stars’ feature in February 2023.
Lily Mo Browne won the 2025 Kathleen Ferrier Award and is a 2025 Verbier Festival Young Artist. Her other competition successes include the Somerset Song Prize (both the main prize and the Audience Prize, and the AESS National English Song Competition.
Nigel Foster has performed at Wigmore Hall, the South Bank Centre, Barbican Centre, Royal Opera House Covent Garden (Crush Bar) and across Europe as well as in North and South America, Japan, Malaysia and New Zealand, playing for singers including Roderick Williams, Dame Sarah Connolly, Nicky Spence, Nadine Benjamin, Kate Royal, Lotte Betts-Dean, James Gilchrist, Julien Van Mellaerts, Ashley Riches, Simon Wallfisch, Louise Winter, and Elizabeth Llewellyn.
Rekha John-Cheriyan’s credits include Sheeba in Hollyoaks, Sabita in Casualty (BBC1), Maggie in the West End run and international tour of Soldier On and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Mrs Abbas in the feature film Polite Society.

Marie-Blanche Vasnier, muse of Claude Debussy - Saturday 28th March, 2pm
Eyra Norman - soprano
Abhisri Chaudhuri - piano

The winners of the 2024 London Song Festival Schubert Song Prize present a complete performance of the Vasnier Songbook; songs that Debussy wrote for Marie-Blanche Vasnier, a high soprano with striking green eyes, with whom he enjoyed an affair from 1880 to around 1887. Debussy was 18 when he met Marie-Blanche, who was 32 and married, and he wrote some of his most exuberant songs for her. This is a rare performance of all 27 solo songs that Debussy wrote for Marie-Blanche. This concert is postponed from 6th December 2025.

Eyra Norman is a Shipston Rising Star and an Opera Prelude Young Artist. She made her debut in 2019 as Belinda in Dido and Aeneas with English National Opera and has since performed as a soloist at venues including the Royal Opera House, Royal Festival Hall, Wigmore Hall, and Royal Albert Hall, and in Italy, Hong Kong and America.
Abhisri Chaudhuri is a 2024 Leeds Lieder Young Artist, winner of the pianist prize of the Somerset Song Prize, and has performed at the Wigmore Hall and in France and Italy.