St Bartholomew's Church, Winchester
Friday 24th 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.
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