Special Event | Echoes of Landscape: Piano, Poetry & Song

Join us for an evening of music and poetry in a collaboration with South Downs Poetry Festival.

The event will begin with a performance from pianist Elena Toponogova and Soprano Eleanor Penfold exploring early to mid-20th century lyricism, where music becomes a form of ‘landscape painting’ in sound. The programme traces a journey from the lyrical, poetic stillness of Roger Quilter and Thomas Dunhill, through the vivid, pictorial settings of Michael Head, to the more complex, shifting harmonic landscapes of Frank Bridge and John Ireland.

After a short interval, regroup for a poetry promenade curated by the South Downs Poetry Festival and led by Barry Smith. Distinguished prizewinning poets including Stephanie Norgate, Naomi Foyle and poet-musician Chris Hardy will present new works inspired by the British Landscapes: A Sense of Place exhibition and the wider landscape. The audience will be treated with pictures in words and sounds to complement and enhance the visual representations.

The South Downs Poetry Festival, SDPF, is an annual pop-up festival that spans the length and breadth of the beautiful South Downs National Park and surrounding areas. The festival is organised by Focus Arts, a registered charity.

This concert and promenade is part of our October Late event. By purchasing this ticket you gain free access to our galleries, exhibitions and drop-in activities from 5–8.30pm.

Elena Toponogova

Concert pianist and chamber musician Elena specialises in Russian repertoire, particularly the works of Nikolai Medtner. A graduate of the Royal College of Music, she has performed internationally as a soloist, earning recognition for championing rarely performed music through concerts, recordings, and festivals.

Eleanor Penfold

Praised by Opera Magazine for having “vocal equipment to dazzle”, soprano Eleanor Penfold is a graduate of the Royal College of Music and winner of the Schubert Song Prize at the London Song Festival. She performs internationally in both opera and contemporary repertoire, and founded the immersive ensemble Transposed in 2019.

Stephanie Norgate

Stephanie is a poet and playwright (BBC Radio 4). Poetry collections published by Bloodaxe Books include Hidden River (shortlisted for Forward and Jerwood Aldeburgh Awards), the Blue Den, and her latest collection The Conversation. Her poems are published in major literary magazines, journals and anthologies. Her novel Hartisborne, partly inspired by Selbourne, was published in 2025.

Naomi Foyle

Naomi is an award-winning British Canadian poet, Science Fiction novelist, essayist and theatre maker. Her many poetry publications include The Night Pavilion, an Autumn 2008 Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and the transatlantic collection Adamantine. Her fourth collection, Salt & Snow, won a glowing review in the Guardian, and has inspired two collaborative filmpoems. ASTRA, Naomi’s theatrical adaptation of her eco-science fantasy quartet The Gaia Chronicles, won the 2022 Brighton Fringe Green Curtain Award. Naomi is Reader in Critical Imaginative Writing at the University of Chichester.

Chris Hardy

Chris Hardy’s fifth poetry collection Key to the Highway was published by Shoestring Press. He has been highly commended in the National Poetry and Live Canon poetry competitions and won the 2025 McLellan prize. He is the secretary of the Chichester Stanza. He is a musician in LiTTLe MACHiNe, ‘the greatest poetry and music band in the world’ (Carol Ann Duffy) and guitarist with Poetry in Motion, with Barry Smith and Charlotte Glasson.

Mandy Pannett

Mandy is the poetry editor for Sentinel Literary Quarterly and has also edited anthologies for Earlyworks Press and for SPM Publications including Poems for a Liminal Age which was published in aid of Médecins Sans Frontières. She has published several collections of poetry and writes reviews of poetry collections for Sentinel and Tears in the Fence. She has won prizes in many national competitions and has been the adjudicator for others.

Joan Secombe

Joan was born in Wales and taught English for many years. Taking a keen interest in creative writing, she was a ‘teacher-trailblazer’ for the Poetry Society. She works with Barry Smith on Chichester Open Mic Poetry and is the secretary and a trustee for the South Downs Poetry Festival. Her collection Moving from the West was recently released.

Barry Smith

Barry is the director of the South Downs Poetry Festival, author of two collections, Performance Rites and Reeling and Writhing, and Patron of the Shelley Memorial Project. Well published in journals and magazines, he was shortlisted for the BBC Proms Poetry and Bread & Roses awards and nominated for the TS Eliot Prize. In the recent Novium exhibition on The Art of Chichester, he was described as ‘Chichester’s unofficial Poet Laureate’.