A Flemish Christmas
Sacred song in midwinter
Saturday 14 December 2024, 7.30pm
St Mary’s, Bourne Street
30 Bourne Street, Belgravia
London SW1W 8JJ
Conducted by David Allinson
This December, The Renaissance Singers mark the season of Advent and herald the coming of Christmas with some of the most arresting and brilliant music written in the decades around 1500.
With a special focus on Mary, mother of Jesus, we sing music from the cathedrals and chapels of the Franco-Flemish flatlands, by composers including Ockeghem, Obrecht, Compère and Mouton — composers too often overshadowed by their contemporary, Josquin.
From the ravishing Nesciens Mater by Mouton, a canonic tour-de-force which casts an intimate portrait of the Virgin nursing the baby Jesus, to the fervent yearning of Obrecht’s titanic Salve Regina, and on to the textural complexity of his Factor orbis, a glorious and rarely-performed 'musical sermon', this is no ordinary Christmas concert.
Join us on a path less travelled as we explore the textures, techniques and emotions of music which will move and delight.
Programme
Antoine Busnois Noel, noel
Antoine Brumel Noe, noe, noe
Loyset Compère O admirabile commercium
Jean Mouton Noe, noe, psallite
Johannes Ockeghem Salve Regina
Jacob Obrecht Factor orbis
Jacob Obrecht Salve Regina
Antoine Mornable Nesciens Mater
Dominique Phinot Virgo parens
Jean Mouton Nesciens Mater
Tickets
Advance tickets (limited availability) £15 / £13 concessions
Standard tickets £17 / £15 concessions
Tickets free for under 21s
(under 16s must be accompanied by a paying adult)
Between rehearsals for our recent Christmas concert one of our singers, Barbara, told us what it's like to sing the soaring soprano lines we love.
Saturday 19 October 2024
7.30 pm
St Stephen’s Rochester Row
London SW1P 1LE
Conducted by David Allinson
Compline is the final service of the day in the Christian monastic tradition, said or sung just before the community retires for the night. With its poetic words invoking sleep and praying for protection, compline can be a meditative, spiritual experience, whatever one’s beliefs.
In the twentieth century, perhaps surprisingly, this minor medieval Office took on new life in the college chapels of the Anglican church (in the face of Synod resistance), and in recent decades it has become immensely popular with church singers and public audiences.
Fairly brief and without sermon or communion, the service of compline comprises a set selection of chanted psalms, hymns and antiphons whose mystical, opaque texts invite listeners to reflect on themes of mortality, penitence and mercy as the evening light fades.
With ancient chant always at the centre of compline pieces, Renaissance composers produced radiant and reflective polyphony for compline. Our programme includes stunning works by Josquin, Tallis, Sheppard and Byrd and some relative rarities – such as Bouzignac’s distilled setting of In pace, and the rich setting of the Pater noster by Handl (also known as Gallus).
The second half of our concert will include the compline liturgy, with attenders invited to sing the liturgical chant sotto voce with the choir, or to listen, as preferred, but to feel the collegiate power of sharing compline in the evening.
Programme included
G. Bouzignac In pace in idipsum a4
J. Sheppard In manus tuas a4
G.P. da Palestrina Salva nos a4 and Nunc dimittis a4
C. Tye Ad te Clamamus a5
T. Tallis In manus tuas a5
W. Byrd Miserere mihi, Domine a6
J. Mouton Salva nos, Domine a6
J. Sheppard Libera nos, salva nos a7
J. Handl (Gallus) Pater noster a8
Josquin des Prez Nunc dimittis a4
Tickets
Advance tickets (limited availability) £15 / £13 concessions
Standard tickets £17 / £15 concessions
Tickets free for under 21s (under 16s must be accompanied by a paying adult)
Lighten our darkness
Music where day becomes night
Sing Joyfully
The Renaissance Singers at 80
Saturday 29 June 2024
6.00 pm
St George’s Church Bloomsbury
London WC1A 2SA
Featuring The San Trovaso Consort
Conducted by David Allinson
London, June 1944. A newly formed choir gives its first concert.
The Renaissance Singers, founded by Michael Howard as the performing wing of the Renaissance Society, were motivated by their love of Renaissance vocal music. They set out to recover lost masterpieces and share them with new audiences.
Repertoire was unfamiliar. Resources were scarce. Concerts were sometimes interrupted by air raids. But with audience members including Ralph Vaughan Williams, and collaborators as illustrious as Peter Pears, the choir went on to become a vital player in the early music revival in Britain.
Under its current Musical Director David Allinson it has become London’s leading amateur chamber choir specialising in early music: pioneering neglected composers, bringing original programmes to new audiences, and collaborating with top-flight musicians ranging from I Fagiolini and Musica Secreta, to Rory McCleery and Patrick Allies in a year-round programme of concerts and workshops.
The first half of this concert will feature music that has particular associations with the choir’s history. In the second half, the singers will be augmented by former members of the choir to perform ambitious and joyful polychoral pieces in the thrilling acoustic of St George’s Bloomsbury, ‘one of the capital’s most wonderful buildings’ (The Guardian), accompanied by cornetts, sackbuts and curtals.
Programme
H. Isaac Virgo Prudentissima a6
R. Fayrfax Magnificat ‘Regale’ a5
J. Clemens Ego flos campi a7
G.P. Palestrina Super flumina Babylonis a4
O. Lassus Missa Puisque j’ay perdu a4, Kyrie and Agnus Dei
T.L. de Victoria Alma redemptoris mater a8
Victoria Ave regina caelorum a8
Victoria Salve regina a8
Victoria Ave Maria a8
Mikolaj Zielenski Magnificat a12
A Lassus Calendar
A year with Lassus
Saturday 23 March 2024
7.30 pm
St Pancras Church
165 Euston Road
London NW1 2BA
Guest conductor: Patrick Allies
Join us on a journey through the liturgical seasons - both joyful and miserable! - with arguably the most inventive composer of the 16th century.
Patrick has chosen music that illustrates Lassus' creative brilliance and variety, ranging from exquisite and melancholy 5-part Lamentations for Holy Week, to vibrant polychoral music in eight and ten parts for Easter and some Marian feasts.
Perhaps most unusual, and rarely performed, is his Prophetae Sibyllarum, a series of adventurous, highly chromatic motets for Advent. They sound like Poulenc...
Programme
All Saints and All Souls
Justorum animae
Requiem a 5: Requiem aeternam
Advent
Alma redemptoris mater
Prophetiae Sibyllarum (Prologue and No.s 1, 2, 4 and 5)
Christmas
Magnificat 'Praeter rerum seriem'
Interval
Epiphany
Missa Vinum bonum: Credo
Holy Week
Lamentations for Holy Thursday, part 2
Lamentations for Holy Saturday, part 1
Easter
Regina caeli
Magnificat 'Aurora lucis rutilat'
Detail from book of psalms by Lassus illumination by Hans Mielich, 1565-60.
Lassus, Roland de / Orlando di Lasso - composer, contrapuntist, choirmaster from the Netherlands. Scene of him with choir in service at Laurentius Hofpfarrkirche, Munich, Chapel Royal, Hofkapelle (Bavarian chapel royal) . LASSUS (in yellow) stands to the left of the pulpit.
Tickets
Advance tickets £12 / £10 (conc.)
(Availability limited to 30 tickets only.)
Standard tickets £14 / £12 (conc.)
Voices from the shadows
Lux Aeterna
Saturday 10 February 2024
7.30 pm
St Pancras Church
165 Euston Road
London NW1 2BA
Director: David Allinson
Organist: William Whitehead
We’re thrilled to have superb concert organist William Whitehead perform with us as a soloist
in music by Antonio de Cabezón, Juan Cabanilles and Francisco Correa de Arauxo, and play continuoin the Lamentations for Holy Thursday by José de Baquedano.
A Requiem from Puebla Cathedral
Lamentations and motets from Spain and the New World
Manual Mendes ✦ Gonçalo Saldanha ✦ José de Baquedano ✦ Antonio Lopez Capillas ✦ Cristóbal de Morales
In the archive of Puebla Cathedral, Mexico, a manuscript from the late 17th century contains a mystery. A polyphonic Mass for the Dead is attributed to Gonçalo Saldanha, yet appears to be a partial adaptation of a Requiem by one of the most influential lost composers of history, Manuel Mendes.
As master of the choristers at Évora Cathedral in late-16th century Portugal, Mendes had taught the ‘golden generation’ of Portuguese polyphonists – Duarte Lobo, Cardoso, Magalhães. Yet only scraps of his own music have reached us; most was destroyed in the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.
In this intriguing and unknown Missa pro Defunctis we catch an echo of Mendes’ music, repurposed by another church musician, working decades later in a massive Cathedral thousands of miles across endless ocean.
The rest of our programme comprises emotive and dramatic music from Spain and its colonies, from the monumental double-choir Lamentations by José de Baquedano, who worked at Santiago Cathedral in the late 17th century, to heart-rending motets by Juan Gutiérrez Padilla, who travelled from Malaga to spend four decades leading music at Puebla Cathedral.
A boy is born for us
Puer natus est nobis
Saturday 16 December 2023
7.30 pm
St Mary's, Bourne Street
London, SW1W 8]J
Director: David Allinson
Thomas Tallis, Missa Puer natus est
William Byrd, Ave Maria and Propers for Advent
Walter Lambe, Nesciens Mater
Alfonso Ferrabosco, Mirabile mysterium
John Sheppard, Verbum caro and other works
Celebrate a Tudor Christmas with The Renaissance Singers as we perform Thomas Tallis’s monumental Mass for Christmas Day (including the fragmentary Credo).
As a final tribute to Byrd in his 400th anniversary year, we interleave the serene movements of Tallis’s Mass with the mercurial Propers for Advent from Byrd’s Gradualia I (1605).
Our festive wreath is completed with majestic motets by Ferrabosco, Sheppard and Lambe.
Music by William Byrd (d.1623), to include:
Mass for Four Voices (extracts)Ne irascaris—Civitas Sancti tui
Emendemus in melius
Justorum animae
Nunc dimittis from the Gradualia
On the afternoon of Sunday 26 October 1623 around 300 people squeezed themselves into the upper room at the French ambassador’s residence in the London district of Blackfriars. From committed Catholics to the curious and undecided, they had come to hear a famous Jesuit speak. Midway through Robert Drury’s sermon the floor of the makeshift chapel gave way, as did the floor of the chamber beneath. The preacher, another priest and more than 90 members of the congregation fell to their deaths; many more were injured by falling masonry.
Contemporary journalists and chroniclers christened the event the ‘doleful evensong’ or ‘fatal vespers’. Eighteen years after the Gunpowder Plot, the event inflamed already-volatile public opinion, with some Protestants seeing the collapse as no accident, but as divine intervention against Papists. Survivors often found themselves treated with malice, rather then sympathy. Most of the dead were interred in two pits at the scene, since the Bishop of London refused them burial on consecrated ground.
Today this shocking event is almost entirely forgotten. So, this autumn, to mark 400 years since the tragedy, the Renaissance Singers are pleased to present a musical meditation in the Catholic church of St Etheldreda’s, a Catholic church with its own fascinating history. During building work in the 1870s it was discovered that eighteen victims of the Fatal Vespers were buried in the crypt. We hope that the music of William Byrd — himself a recusant Catholic, who died in July 1623 — will bring an appropriate, meditative spirit to this event.
We are delighted that our speaker is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the religious history of Britain, Eamon Duffy, Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity (Magdalene College, Cambridge). Professor Duffy will set the political and social context of the Fatal Vespers, exploring the plight of the victims and the public reaction to the event. Prayers and meditation will be led by the Rector of St Etheldreda’s, Fr Tom Thomas IC.
Free public event (no booking); retiring collection.
The commemoration will last about an hour and a quarter.
Nearest stations: City Thameslink, Farringdon, Chancery Lane
Commemorating the ‘Fatal Vespers’ of 1623,
the forgotten catastrophe at Blackfriars
A meditation led by Fr Tom Thomas IC
with speaker Eamon Duffy, Emeritus Professor of the
History of Christianity at Magdalene College, Cambridge
and music by The Renaissance Singers
directed by David Allinson
Monday 30 October 2023, 7pm
St Etheldreda’s Church
14 Ely Place, London
EC1N 6RY
The year is 1611. William Byrd rehearses his music with a choir in Ingatestone Hall, Essex, the home of his patron, Lord Petre
— sometimes with a little impatience ...
Now in his early 60s, England’s greatest living musician is in reflective mood, musing about his life, his music and his religion. He ponders the tribulations of writing overtly Catholic music in volatile times. He remembers his relationship with the late Queen, relives the terror of persecution and the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. He thinks also about great contemporary figures and writers, not least the dramatist whose work intrigues him most: Shakespeare. Byrd stands before us, striving to make sense of the miracle that is his music and the mysteries which lie at its heart.
William Byrd died in Essex on 4 July 1623. Four hundred years later, as the musical world celebrates his genius, the Renaissance Singers raise their voices in Master Byrd, a new short play by Brean Hammond.
We are thrilled to be performing in the very place where the play is set, Ingatestone Hall, still owned by the family who sheltered and supported Byrd: the Petres. We hope you will join us, for a unique experience in a space the composer would have known well.
PROGRAMME TO INCLUDE
Ravenscroft Hold thy peace
Byrd Mass for four voices – Sanctus, Agnus Dei
Byrd Retire my soul
Byrd O magnum mysterium – Beata Virgo
Byrd Fantasia in C
Byrd Justorum animae
Tallis If ye love me
Byrd Emendemus in melius
Byrd Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?
Byrd Ne irascaris, Domine
Byrd Sing joyfully
Byrd Ave verum corpus
We are delighted that Vincent Franklin will perform the part of William Byrd. His television work includes Happy Valley 2 and 3, Doc Martin, Bodyguard, Cucumber, The Office, Twenty Twelve, The Thick of It and Decline and Fall. His film work includes Topsy Turvy, Peterloo, The Bourne Identity and Allelujah!
Master Byrd
a new play by Brean Hammond with live choral interpolations
Saturday 21 October 2023
performances at 4pm and 7pm
Ingatestone Hall
Hall Lane, Ingatestone
Essex CM4 9NR
Director: David Allinson
How to commemorate a composer with more than some greatest hits?
Brean Hammond describes the parallels between Byrd and Shakespeare that inspired his new play.