Wednesday 14th April 2021 • 11pm to 12am • Live on Youtube

Celebrate the return of the nightingales to UK shores with this special live broadcast.

Submissions for Homecoming

Thank you so much to everyone that submitted offerings to the nightingales! We were overwhelmed by the depth and quality of what was sent in.

After some difficult decision making, the final broadcast featured:

Victoria Jane Kearney – Untitled

Andrew Taylor – Nightingale

Georgie Buchanan – Love Is A Rocking Wave

Elsa Carolan – Nightingale

Adrian Adey – A Memory Of Listening To A Nightingale

Tommy Jonson – Fibres

The Makeshift Ensemble – Nightingale Tale

Philippa Snell – Birds In The Spring

Malcolm Prue – Untitled

Sourced Band & Charlie Schnurr – Sweet Nightingale

Anne Jagger – Bird Raptures by Christina Rosetti

Bethany Weimers – Untitled

Charlotte Walker – Untitled

Words of a Fiddler’s Daughter – To The Nightingale

Mog Fry – Untitled

Wilderthorn – Forest Song

Christopher Martin – Shape of Something There

Mariele Jankowski – Lighthouse In The Countryside

Julia Lee – Untitled

Penny Stone – Nightingales Are Here

Matthew Shaw – Untitled

Olivia Harding – The Nightsinger

Jehane Markham – Untitled

Ahlyah Ali – Untitled

Ben See – He Sings The Sun

And of course, your host Sam Lee and the brilliant Conor Gricmanis on baroque violin.

Each year, for a short period mid-April, a few thousand nightingales fly to southern UK from Africa. They can be heard in just a small number of special locations, taking up songful residence after dusk. The territorial males serenade loyally each night for no more than six weeks among the blackthorn and forest margins, giving unbelievable privilege to those who know where to go.

On 14th April we will mark this occasion by listening to possibly the first singing nightingale of the season, with Sam Lee microphone-ready at the birds’ reliable Sussex habitat.

In this modern age, with biodiversity in decline and habitats being eroded, the nightingale has become representative of all that we have to lose. It is a small, brown, unremarkable-looking bird, but it possesses one of nature’s finest singing voices. The bird winters in Africa but spends April to July mating and nesting in Europe and the Middle East. The numbers visiting England have declined so sharply that it is now on the UK’s Red List of species at the greatest conservation risk. Click here for more information on the nightingale and its conservation.

In Spring 2020, with the sudden lockdown and restrictions in place across the UK, we had to work hard to reimagine our Singing With Nightingales concert series for extraordinary times. After some serious technical exploration and re-devising, we launched our ‘from the forest’ digital versions of Singing with Nightingales. These online events had Sam Lee, deep in the Sussex woods, beaming live nightingale song to our special guest collaborators, with the whole sonic duet broadcast live on Youtube. You can find the 2020 series on our Youtube channel.

This Homecoming event is the next chapter in our online programme, inviting audiences across the world to hear the unforgettable sounds of the nightingale. Whether you’re in California or Coventry, Moscow or Middlesborough, we invite you to Sussex for the evening to enjoy one of nature’s most captivating arias.

Invite your friends to watch with you! Join the Facebook event here