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.