Following the exciting announcement of a four-night series at the Actors’ Church Covent Garden this October, the Lamplight Concerts team is delighted to announce an extra-special Christmas show on 25 November.
Extending the Lamplight experience into the festive season, this one-night-only Christmas Special will transform the spectacular 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 a magical evening of music, light and Christmas atmosphere in the heart of 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 the legendary 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. She is not simply a singer to watch, but an artist reshaping what a classical concert can be.
“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 you sit inside rather than watch. Intimate, cinematic and gone as soon as it arrives.
Lamplight Concerts run on 8th, 14th (relaxed performance) and 22nd October 2026 at 7pm
The Christmas Lamplight Concert with Duo Atlantis will take place on 25th November
Tickets are £20, or £10 for concessions, and are on sale now.
European dates have also been announced.
Book your October tickets here: actorschurch.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873664648