Monteverdi Vespers 30 May 2026

Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610
Great Malvern Priory
Saturday 30 May 2026

Booking information

Cambridge Renaissance Voices join forces with The Musical and Amicable Society on period instruments to bring to life the golden age of Venetian music, when St Mark's Basilica echoed to the sound of Monteverdi's Vespers and music by his forerunner Giovanni Gabrieli. 

From the dramatic opening fanfare quoting Monteverdi's Orfeo to the closing hymn Ave Maris Stella celebrating the Virgin Mary and the city of Venice as 'star of the sea', Monteverdi's settings of psalms and motets in the Vespers will be combined in this performance with Gabrieli's lively instrumental Canzone and his spectacular polychoral motet Omnes Gentes.  Both composers played a pivotal role in the shift in musical styles from the serenely interwoven lines of Renaissance polyphony to more dramatic elements of the Baroque, with rich choral sonorities, declamatory solo passages, and lavishly ornamented instrumental ritornelli.  In Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, the solemnity and splendour of religious rites meet the drama of early opera in a strikingly original fusion of vocal styles. 

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. 

Concert in King's Lynn, 19 November 2022

Sacred music from Renaissance Spain and Portugal
King's Lynn Minster
Saturday 19 November, 7:30pm

This concert explores the beautiful repertoire of sacred choral music from the Golden Age of Spain and Portugal, representing one of the pinnacles of the European Renaissance.  The programme centres on music by Francisco Guerrero, maestro di capilla at the spectacular cathedral in Seville, and perhaps the greatest composer of the Spanish Renaissance, Tomas Luis de Victoria, who spent much of his career in Rome but returned to his native Spain as chaplain to the Empress Maria, daughter of Charles V, in Madrid.  

The flowering of sacred polyphony in neighbouring Portugal was equally magnificent, represented here in motets by Pedro de Cristo and Aires Fernandez, both of whom worked at the monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra.  By turns serene and dramatic, this rich repertoire combines an intense spirituality with a vivid range of emotional expression.  From the searingly beautiful strains of mourning in Lobo's 'Versa Est in Luctum' to the delicate madrigal-like patterns of Victoria's setting of 'Vidi Speciosam' from the Song of Songs, this programme showcases Iberian composers' ability to infuse religious music with sensuality, tenderness and passion. 

Purchase tickets here (discounted for advance booking)

Waltham Abbey 15 October

We're delighted to be returning to Waltham Abbey for a programme of Iberian music. Works by Guerrero, Victoria and others.

Saturday 15 October 2022
Lunchtime recital
12:30 - 1:15pm

Gorgeous music in a fabulous setting. It's what we like best!

Find the church

Jephthe at Wilton, 14 May 2022.

Cambridge Renaissance Voices return to the Italianate church in Wilton for a feast of Italian Renaissance and Baroque music.   

The programme features choral polyphony from Palestrina, Lotti’s searing Crucifixus, and works by Monteverdi, including extracts from the Vespers of 1610.  The centrepiece of this programme is a performance of Carissimi’s oratorio Jephte, with soprano Kate Semmens singing the part of Jephte’s daughter, and a continuo ensemble including lutenist Lynda Sayce on theorbo, and Joanna Levine of Fretwork on bass viol. 

Tickets available here.

Josquin and his Legacy: Long Melford concert 21 November

In music as in art, the Renaissance was in large part shaped by the currents of influence between the low countries – Flanders and the Burgundian Netherlands – and the courts of the Italian city states, from Milan and Ferrara down through Florence to Rome. 

Ticket information

This programme traces the musical diaspora epitomised by the career and legacy of Josquin des Prez, the master of Franco-Flemish polyphony, who worked variously for the Sforza dynasty, the Papal court including the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, and Duke Ercole of Ferrara. 

It includes movements from his great Pange Lingua mass, and music by his successors including Philippe De Monte, whose own move from Flanders to Italy led him eventually to the Habsburg courts and also to visit England where he formed a musical friendship with William Byrd.

Informal concert: 22 August, Holy Trinity, Winchester

 

From Flanders to Rome: Josquin and his legacy

Saturday 16 May 2020, 7:30pm
St Mary & St Nicholas, Wilton

CANCELLED

Star of the Sea: music from Venice and the Italian Renaissance

Sunday 17 November, 7:30pm
Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford

Booking information: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/mkctw/star-of-the-sea/e-jmxbyb

For this concert, we are joined once again by the instrumentalists I Musici della Contessa - a small ensemble comprising sackbuts, cornett and curtal.

The maritime republic of Venice played a unique role in the music of the Italian Renaissance and early Baroque. From the songs of the gondoliere to the splendour of the sacred works sung in St Mark’s basilica, music was at the heart of the city’s culture.

This programme centres on the mass setting ‘Bell’ Amfitrit Altera’ by Orlando di Lasso, thought to be based on a popular song celebrating Amphitrite, goddess of the sea. It may have been written for the annual Ascension Day ceremony ‘Lo Sposalizio’, in which a wedding ring was thrown into the water to celebrate the symbolic marriage of the city of Venice to the sea.

While Lassus never worked in Venice, many of his works were published there, and his affinity with its music no doubt stemmed from a visit in 1562 by Andrea Gabrieli, founding father of the Venetian school of composers, who with his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli built a Europe-wide reputation for the sheer magnificence of polychoral works written for performance under the gold mosaic domes of St Mark’s. In the style which became known as ‘cori spezzati’, split choirs were stationed around the church singing antiphonally, often with instrumental accompaniment. This theatrical approach to musical sonority paved the way for the development of the Baroque style in the music of Claudio Monteverdi, whose Ave Maris Stella - a characteristically Venetian celebration of the Virgin Mary as ‘star of the sea’ - comes at the culmination of his Vespers of 1610.

In the glorious acoustic of Holy Trinity Long Melford, Cambridge Renaissance Voices recreate this Venetian soundworld with the sackbuts and cornetts of I Musici della Contessa.

A terrific reception at Wilton

 

Sacred Music from Renaissance Italy, 18 May

Saturday 18 May, 7:30pm
Palestrina, Croce, Lotti and more

St Mary & St Nicholas Church, Wilton

Tickets £13 in advance (£15 on the door)
Book online

In this concert, Cambridge Renaissance Voices (hailed for ‘beautifully controlled’ performances full of ‘understanding and passion’), bring together some of the great choral masterpieces from across the spectrum of the Italian Renaissance.

Italy’s status as ‘cradle of the Renaissance’ was as vital to the history of music as for the visual arts. From the 15th century on, many of Europe’s greatest composers travelled from France, the Netherlands and Spain, to work for aristocratic and religious patrons, among them the powerful Sforza, Gonzaga, Este and Borgia dynasties.

Josquin des Prez worked for much of his life in Milan, Rome and Ferrara; and Victoria (or Vittoria, as he became known) had two prolific decades in Rome. Alongside these musical immigrants, Italy’s own composers – above all Palestrina - were crucial in shaping the development of sacred polyphony. Palestrina’s serenely beautiful ‘Missa Papae Marcelli’, written in honour of the brief reign of Pope Marcellus II, became the definitive Papal Coronation Mass and was credited with having rescued choral music from the threat of being banished altogether from the church at the Council of Trent in 1562-3.

 After Palestrina, the centre of gravity began to shift northwards to Venice, where the ‘stile antico’, still predominant in the music of Giovanni Croce and Andrea Gabrieli, eventually gave way to a more dramatic style in the work of Monteverdi and Antonio Lotti, moving polyphonic choral music into the Baroque idiom, increasingly favouring the theatrical power of dissonance and emotional affect.

Long Melford, 18 November

Sunday 18 November, 7:30pm

Tickets £16 from Theatre Royal Box Office 01284 769505

The Song of Solomon, otherwise known as the Song of Songs, features some of the most beautiful and sensuous poetic language in the Bible.

Celebrated liturgically as an allegory of the relationship between Christ and his bride the Church, the verses themselves are plainly erotic, evoking a luxuriant sexuality in terms of fragrant spices, ripening vines, orchards and gardens richly planted with pomegranates and lilies. This coalescence of spiritual meaning and sensuality gave free rein to Renaissance composers’ powers of musical expression, allowing them to reflect a heavenly beauty in music that is nevertheless richly grounded in a garden of earthly delights.

Cambridge Renaissance Voices explore this repertoire across Renaissance Europe, from Franco-Flemish composers such as Lassus and Clemens non Papa, through the music of Palestrina in Italy, to that of Tomas Luis da Victoria and Francisco Guerrero in Spain.

Flemish-born Orlando Lassus spent time in many different countries but settled in Munich in the service of the Duke of Bavaria. He was prolific and his music influential. He wrote about 60 settings of the mass, generally ‘parody’ masses based on borrowed tunes. In the case of the Osculetur Me mass, however, he used material from his own motet on the text. In the course of the mass, each of the motifs from the motet reappear in various different guises, rather like a theme and variations where the melody is first unvarnished (in the Kyrie) then progressively elaborated (especially in the Creed) before returning to a pure but transformed rendition to close (the Agnus Dei).

The programme also includes Victoria's incredible motet 'Vadam et circuibo'. The opening section of the text translates as follows: "I will rise, and will go about the city: in the streets and the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, and I found him not. I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, that you tell him that I languish with love." A piece of astonishing beauty and drama, this work surely derives its special quality from the composer's intensely emotional response to the text.

Waltham Abbey 6 October

We're very excited to be singing a concert in the evocative space of Waltham Abbey, where Thomas Tallis spent some of his formative years in the reign of Henry VIII.

It's a short lunchtime recital, and it's free to attend.

We'll be bringing the sunshine of Portugal and Spain to autumnal Essex. After this, our next concert is back at Long Melford on 18 November.

Long Melford, 18 November 2018

Sunday 18 November, 7:30pm

Tickets £16 from Theatre Royal Box Office 01284 769505

The Song of Solomon, otherwise known as the Song of Songs, features some of the most beautiful and sensuous poetic language in the Bible.

Celebrated liturgically as an allegory of the relationship between Christ and his bride the Church, the verses themselves are plainly erotic, evoking a luxuriant sexuality in terms of fragrant spices, ripening vines, orchards and gardens richly planted with pomegranates and lilies. This coalescence of spiritual meaning and sensuality gave free rein to Renaissance composers’ powers of musical expression, allowing them to reflect a heavenly beauty in music that is nevertheless richly grounded in a garden of earthly delights.

Cambridge Renaissance Voices explore this repertoire across Renaissance Europe, from Franco-Flemish composers such as Lassus and Clemens non Papa, through the music of Palestrina in Italy, to that of Tomas Luis da Victoria and Francisco Guerrero in Spain.