Concert, Boxgrove Priory, 16 November 2025

Cambridge Renaissance Voices return to the glorious acoustic of Boxgrove Priory for a special concert with Fretwork, acclaimed by the London Evening Standard as 'the finest viol consort on the planet'. 

Tickets: £5 discount for advance booking

The seventeenth century was the golden age of English consort music, when voices and viols were used interchangeably or together. Viol consorts were central to domestic music-making, in part-songs or madrigals equally suited to string players or singers. A parallel tradition developed in church music; for over a hundred years, English composers explored the fascination of vocally inspired instrumental polyphony by writing ‘In nomines’ for viol consort, weaving elaborate instrumental lines around a musical theme taken from the Tudor composer John Taverner’s mass on the plainchant ‘Gloria Tibi Trinitas’. 

Voices and viols came together in the verse anthem, whose greatest Jacobean exponents included Thomas Weelkes, and Orlando Gibbons whose 400th anniversary we celebrate this year. After the Restoration, the music of Henry Purcell represents in many ways the culmination of this rich tradition. While his anthems straddle the musical styles of the late Renaissance and a more dramatic idiom signalling the early Baroque, Purcell’s viol Fantasias look back to an earlier age, bringing to an old instrumental form a dazzling complexity and musical beauty. 

FRETWORK has established itself over four decades as the leading exponent of viol consort music, with an extensive list of award-winning recordings, and collaborations with singers from Emma Kirkby to Ian Bostridge, and actor Simon Callow. Equally at home in English churches or New York's Carnegie Hall, they have toured extensively in Europe, North and South America as well as the UK. Extending the repertoire well beyond its heartland in consort music of the English golden age, their adventurous programming has earned them over 40 commissions from contemporary composers.

Concert, Winchester, 24 October 2025

Reformation and Renaissance in Tudor England: Sacred Music from Taverner to Byrd

St Bartholomew's Church, Winchester

Friday 24^th  October, 7.15pm

Familiar to Winchester's music-lovers from their concerts in St Cross, Cambridge Renaissance Voices come to St Bartholomew's to open Hye900's King Alfred Weekend with a concert of sacred music from Tudor England, by composers such as Taverner, Tallis, Byrd and Sheppard. 

English church music of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was shaped by seismic shifts in the nation’s religious orientation in the wake of the Reformation, which saw the destruction of monasteries like Hyde Abbey. Despite the break from Rome, the reign of Mary I (married to Philip II of Spain in Winchester in 1554) saw fervent efforts to restore the Catholic faith before Elizabeth I took the throne. 

The continuing threat posed by Catholic rebellions in support of her cousin Mary Queen of Scots and the launch of the Spanish Armada intensified Elizabeth's enforcement of Protestantism, driving Catholic worship into the closet. Musically, these conflicts entailed a cultural tug-of-war between plainer and more transparent settings of English liturgy prescribed for Protestant worship, and the florid and elaborate Latin polyphony associated with Catholicism, so that Tudor composers often had to adapt abruptly from one style to another, according to the needs and dictates of the church and monarch.

Ticket link:  https://www.hyde900.org.uk/events/upcoming-events#h.8sdtavj2fto1

Concert at St Cross, 17 May 2025

To celebrate 500 years since the birth of Palestrina, Cambridge Renaissance Voices presents a glorious programme of music from 16th-century Rome, where he began and ended his career as Maestro di Cappella at St Peter's. 

Buy tickets: £15 in advance (£17.50 on the door)

Palestrina's place in musical history rests on his extraordinary output of over 100 masses and 250 motets; the sheer beauty of their flowing and harmonious contrapuntal style earned him great fame and many imitators.  

While Palestrina and his successor at St Peter's, Felice Anerio, were native to Rome and spent their entire careers there, the tradition of sacred music in in the Papal City was by no means exclusively Italian.  In the 15th century, the Borgia Popes reflected their Spanish origins by employing musicians from Spain in the Papal chapel.  This tradition continued under Pope Paul III, who employed Cristobal de Morales as a tenor in the choir of the Sistine Chapel from 1535.  Palestrina was meanwhile singing in the Capella Giulia at St Peter's as a boy treble, and it is highly likely that Morales's works were in their repertoire.  In the decade which Morales spent in Rome, he published two books of masses; his motets appeared in over 30 printed sources in the mid-16th century, as well as many manuscript collections.

A decade after Morales's death, Spain's most celebrated Renaissance composer, Tomas Luis de Victoria, arrived in Rome.  He spent over 20 years working at the Jesuit German College and the Pontifical Roman Seminary, where he succeeded Palestrina as Maestro di Cappella.  While Victoria's music undoubtedly shows Palestrina's influence, it combines the fluent serenity of his polyphony with a new level of spiritual and emotional intensity, employing dramatic dissonances to profoundly moving effect.

Concert in King's Lynn: Queen of Heaven

Sunday 17 November, 7:30pm

Tickets £15 in advance (£17.50 on the door)

Cambridge Renaissance Voices return to the glorious acoustic of King’s Lynn Minster with a joyful programme of Renaissance polyphony written in celebration of the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven.  

It takes us on a journey through the music of the 16th and early 17th century, from the Franco-Flemish Josquin des Prez, who spent much of his career in Italy, to the Spanish masters Alonso Lobo and Francisco Guerrero, working together in Seville, and Tomas Luis de Victoria, who succeeded Palestrina as Maestro at the Pontifical Seminary in Rome, eventually returning to Spain for a royal appointment in Madrid.   

The tradition of Marian polyphony developing through these and many other composers of the European Renaissance ranges from gentle meditative settings of the Ave Maria and the prayer for compline Ave Regina Caelorum which culminates in the triumphal injuction ‘Gaude Virgo Gloriosa’, to full-blown polyphonic exuberance in the celebratory Easter antiphon, Regina Coeli Laetare: Queen of Heaven, Rejoice. 

Tunbridge Wells 19 May 2024: Music for Pentecost

Sunday 19 May, 7pm
Church of King Charles the Martyr, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1YL

Booking information

The choir's visit to Tunbridge Wells falls on Whit Sunday, or Pentecost, so our programme features music to celebrate the season, including Tallis's densely woven motet for seven voices, 'Loquebantur', and Palestrina's 'Dum complerentur'. The settings of these texts reflect the excitement of the coming of the Holy Spirit to the apostles and their speaking in tongues, with multiple voices energetically vying for attention, punctuated by repeated alleluias. 

Concert 12 November 2023: German Sacred Music from Renaissance to Baroque

Cambridge Renaissance voices return to Suffolk, with our debut concert at the magnificent church at Lavenham, together with Kate Semmens (soprano), Paul Nicholson (organ) and Lynda Sayce (theorbo) for a programme of German sacred music from Praetorius to Bach and beyond. 

The towering figure of J S Bach has dominated the history of church music in Germany, but the roots of the Lutheran tradition on which he drew take us back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  We follow this line of influence, through the music of Praetorius, Heinrich Schütz and Johann Christoph Bach, culminating in the greatest of J S Bach’s choral motets, Jesu Meine Freude.

Woven through the programme are solos by soprano Kate Semmens from Anna Magdalena Bach’s notebook, a collection of favourite pieces compiled by J S Bach’s second wife, including Stölzel’s much-loved Bist du bei Mir. 

Tickets and booking information

Byrd and his contemporaries: concert at St Cross, 20th May

Splendour and devotion in Renaissance England
Church of St Cross, Winchester
Saturday 20th May 2023, 7:30pm

Ticket information

Cambridge Renaissance Voices return to the glorious acoustic of St Cross to celebrate the 400th anniversary of William Byrd, England's greatest composer of the late Renaissance.  Negotiating the religious divisions of his time, Byrd served the Protestant Elizabeth I while preserving his own faith as a Catholic.  It is in the Latin motets that he gave the most sublime expression to the spiritual anguish experienced by those who found themselves religious exiles in their own country, tempered by a serene beauty that suggests a form of consolation in their own devotion.  In this concert, Byrd's choral masterpieces are set in the context of sacred music by contemporary composers from Tudor and Stuart England.