LAMPLIGHT CONCERTS to Present Christmas Show at Actors' Church

Following the announcement of a four-night series at the Actors' Church Covent Garden this October, the Lamplight Concerts team has announced an extra-special Christmas show on November 25.

Extending the Lamplight experience into the festive season, this one-night-only Christmas Special will transform the 400-year-old Actors' Church into a glowing landscape of one-of-a-kind lamps, intimate pools of dynamic light and live music.

Part concert, part immersive art installation, it promises an evening of music, light and Christmas atmosphere in Covent Garden, with a setting created by The Prop Making Company's Neil Darcy and Offie-nominated lighting designer Peter Small.

At the heart of it all are Duo Atlantis, mezzo-soprano Rachel Payne and pianist Jack Tyndale-Biscoe, taking audiences on a one-hour live journey through love, loss and light. In a world increasingly mediated by screens and algorithms, Lamplight offers something atmospheric, intimate and a little bit magical, and it's only happening for five nights.

Mezzo-soprano Rachel Payne — a golden-age voice by way of San Jose, New York's Manhattan School of Music and Vienna's Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität, mentored by Marilyn Horne — is the artistic force behind Lamplight Concerts. As both performer and creator, she has designed an entire immersive experience around the human voice: light, story, and song built into one room.

'I wanted to invite people into my musical and figurative home. I wanted to build a world that felt alive and vibrant,' said Rachel Payne, mezzo-soprano and Artistic Director of Lamplight Concerts. 'So much of how we listen now happens in isolation. It so often feels acoustically and visually manipulated. Lamplight is the opposite: a room full of colourful and dynamic light, with voice and piano, raw and earnest. Nothing between you and the music. I wanted to offer the kind of night where people leave feeling like, this really was for me!'

Payne and pianist Jack Tyndale-Biscoe met in an upstairs room at the Royal College of Music, beneath a portrait of Beethoven, and founded Duo Atlantis on one idea: that much of the most beautiful music has been hiding in plain sight. Since forming in 2024, they have taken art song from Carnegie Hall to Vienna, Paris and Prague. This autumn they bring it home to a glowing church in Covent Garden.

'Art song is our Atlantis. A whole lost world of music worth rediscovering,' said pianist Jack Tyndale-Biscoe of Duo Atlantis. 'To bring it into a space like the Actors' Church, by lamplight, for an audience close enough to hear every breath, is exactly the kind of live, human experience we set out to make.'

The duo's debut album, recorded at Abbey Road Studios and due in 2027, includes selections from Elgar's Sea Pictures, a fitting choice: Sir Edward Elgar was the very first artist to record in Studio 1, back in 1931.

The Actors' Church has held London audiences since 1633 and remembers half the West End on its walls, among them Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward and Vivien Leigh. For four nights this October it becomes something new: a luminous, hand-built concert experience audiences sit inside rather than watch.

Event Details

What: Lamplight Concerts, an immersive concert experience created by Rachel Payne and performed with Duo Atlantis.

Dates: 2, 8, 14, 22 October & 25th November 2026

Time: 7pm

Venue: St Paul's, the Actors' Church, Bedford Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 9ED

October Tickets: £20 general admission, £10 concessions. On sale now at https://actorschurch.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873664648

November Tickets: https://actorschurch.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873664757/events

Running time: Approximately one hour, no interval

Seating: Unreserved. Audiences are advised to arrive early

About Lamplight Concerts

Lamplight Concerts is an immersive concert experience that reimagines classical song as a night out, staged amid a landscape of bespoke lamps and dynamic lighting. Created and directed by mezzo-soprano Rachel Payne, it makes its debut at St Paul's, the Actors' Church, in October 2026.