Update: The first broadcast included Pet Shop Boys, Bernard Butler, Cosmo Sheldrake, Isobel Waller-Bridge, Seth Lakeman, Nick Mulvey, Julie Fowlis, Johnny Flynn, Jessie Buckely, John Smith, Sara Nicolls, Jocelyn Pook, and Blythe Pepino & words from Robert MacFarlane, Jay Griffiths, Gavin Turk, Lily Cole, Simon McBurney, Matthew Bannister, Simon Armitage, Chris Packham, Farhana Yarmin & Ed Gillespie. You can watch it below. Presented by the Nest Collective. You can donate here:
To mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, the Nest Collective in partnership with Music Declares Emergency and Culture Declares Emergency are launching an uplifting online offering called Singing with Nightingales: Live at Home.
Featuring pioneering and award-winning folk singer and campaigner, Sam Lee, as host, this special event will take place live from a Sussex wood on 22nd April 2020, with additional contributions from a series of prominent figures from the worlds of music, art, activism, poetry and prose, all woven with storytelling and song, broadcasting direct from their own homes.
Guests so far include; Bernard Butler, Lily Cole, Cosmo Sheldrake, Matthew Bannister, Isobel Waller-Bridge, Seth Lakeman, Simon McBurney, Robert Macfarlane and Gavin Turk with more contributors to be announced shortly.
Taking place on Wednesday 22nd April 2020, this nighttime broadcast will run from 22.00 – 01.00 and takes the form of storytelling, poetry, prose and song in duets with the courtship song of the Nightingale. Broadcasting from deep in the Sussex countryside, one of the last habitats of wild nightingales in the UK,
Sam Lee will be live-streaming in the spirit of Beatrice Harrison’s pioneering 1924 BBC broadcasts of cello duets with the nightingale – the original inspiration for Singing with Nightingales. Each guest will be offering their own contribution – in duet with these unique birds and their celebrated song.
Using a bespoke technical set up devised by the Nest Collective the two streams; Sam in the woods, the contributor’s in their homes, will be married together and broadcast out to the world online as an audio stream via YouTube Live via www.thenestcollective.co.uk
This special event also serves as a launchpad for the new, online version of the acclaimed Singing with Nightingales season taking place between 29th April and 9th May 2020 – For more details, please see thenestcollective.co.uk/singing-with-nightingales