Saturday 15 October 2022
Lunchtime recital
12:30 - 1:15pm
Gorgeous music in a fabulous setting. It's what we like best!
28.9.22
Waltham Abbey 15 October
7.3.22
Jephthe at Wilton, 14 May 2022.
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.
11.10.21
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.
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.
11.1.20
From Flanders to Rome: Josquin and his legacy
St Mary & St Nicholas, Wilton
CANCELLED
1.8.19
Star of the Sea: music from Venice and the Italian Renaissance
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.
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