Gig: GreenMatthews' Midwinter Revels
Spanning several centuries, GreenMatthews’ Midwinter Revels is a celebration of Yuletide Past guaranteed to warm the cockles of the most Scrooge-like heart. Featuring Christmas carols, winter folk songs, toe-tapping tunes and a plethora of weird and wonderful instruments, the show is brought to life with GreenMatthews’ trademark wit and humour.
Chris Green and Sophie Matthews are modern-day balladeers, specialising in telling stories through song.
GreenMatthews are firm believers in the age-old power of narrative song to delight contemporary audiences. Taking their cue from ancient troubadour tradition, they are 21st-century wandering players. They tour throughout the UK and Europe. Their music and tales are rooted in the past, but their performances are entirely of the 21st century – immediate and accessible to modern audiences.
Born into a musical family in Coventry, Chris began playing guitar at the age of eight and piano from the age of nine, and plays most things with fretted strings or keys. Largely self-taught, he’s worked in a variety of musical genres including folk, theatre and early music. He’s a regular musician at Shakespeare’s Globe and was also one of the musicians on BBC’s Poldark, appearing in series 1 and 2.
He also writes and composes, having adapted The Wind in the Willows (2017), and A Christmas Carol: In Concert (2018). His solo album Switched-On Playford, fuses 17th-century dance music with electronica, using a blend of early instruments, synths and loops. His latest commission from English Heritage was a live score for the 1922 silent film Nosferatu.
Sophie began playing flute at the age of ten but is known best as one of the foremost players of the English border bagpipe in the UK. She plays a variety of early woodwind instruments such as shawm, rauschpfeife and recorder. She’s one of a handful of British players of the baroque musette, an 18th century French bagpipe similar to the Northumbrian smallpipes. Sophie is a superb interpreter of narrative song with a clear, pure and unaffected soprano voice. When not touring with GreenMatthews, Sophie is an accredited lecturer for The Arts Society, lecturing on Music in Art. Sophie also makes instruments (she made her own baroque oboe) and works with respected luthier Tony Millyard on his flutes. As a musician Sophie plays with The Oxford Waits as well as the early music collective Piva.