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.
