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These variations on John Dowland’s love song Come Away, Sweet Love Doth Now Invite were composed originally to be played by a wedding string quartet. This is the first performance in an extended version for string orchestra, including two new variations. Harlow Symphony Orchestra – St John’s Church, Epping Sunday 2 July 7.30pm

Psallite Women’s Choir (director Nancy Hadden) commissioned this work with support from Cockayne Grants for the Arts and the London Community Foundation. The text weaves together joyful extracts from Psalm 68, Walt Whitman, Thomas Campion and Emily Bronte. Rhapsodic bursts of renaissance flute punctuate shifting choral and solo textures and little touches of percussion add colour and sparkle. Psallite Women’s Choir – The Old Church, Stoke Newington Thursday 29 June 7.30pm

As part of Granta Chorale’s concert O Radiant Dawn, Granta Chorale will give the premiere of By Thee I Will Abide. With a Psalm-based text, this begins with a troubled and anguished plea for mercy. Then at the resolution ‘By Thee I will Abide’ a soothing lullaby combines a repeating mantra-like accompaniment with weaving canonic lines over the top. Two canons then combine and gradually subside to a peaceful ending. First performance in Ely Cathedral

Conductor Joanna Tomlinson has commissioned this setting of First World War poet Siegfred Sassoon’s most famous poem for Farnham Youth Choir. The poem encompasses a joyful reaction to the end of the war and perhaps too the way that an outbreak of singing in the trenches had banished the horror. The setting develops ideas inspired by the poem’s sudden universal joy and bird imagery and its recurring main theme repeats and dies away to the

Written for baritone soloist, mixed chorus and orchestra, this is a joyful celebration of singing. Words by Emily Dickinson, Rabindranath Tagore, Sara Teasdale and Abraham Cowley in their differing ways all examine the special powers and attributes of singing. In amongst them comes an energetic dance movement sung entirely to nonsense syllables inspired by Scottish mouth music and vocal exercises. The finale sets a poem by Robert Herrick and builds to a climactic conclusion on