— C O N C E R T S —
Friday 1st April 2022, 7:00 pm
Concert for Lent
Reproaches, Lamentation & PenitenceAn hour-long concert of choral music for Lent, exploring themes of repentance, lamentation and petitions for mercy.
Works by Renaissance masters are cast alongside music from the present day, including two settings of text from the ‘Improperia’ or ‘Reproaches’ published over 400 years apart. Featuring music by renowned 16th-century composers William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, as well as their lesser-known contemporaries Sulpitia Cesis, an Italian lutenist-composer and nun, and Vicente Lusitano, whose 1555 book of motets makes him Europe’s first published composer of African descent. Early music sits shoulder-to-shoulder with works from the 20th and 21st centuries, including John Sanders’s ‘The Reproaches’, a deeply-evocative work first written in 1984 for Good Friday in Gloucester Cathedral, and James MacMillan’s masterful ‘Miserere’, which reimagines Gregorio Allegri’s iconic setting of the same text into a rich contemporary soundworld full of drama, beauty and intense emotional outpouring.
Thomas Tallis
Sancte Deus
John Sanders
The Reproaches
Vicente Lusitano
Emendemus in melius
Sulpitia Cesis
Stabat Mater
Freddie Crowley
Stabat Mater
William Byrd
Civitas sancti tui
James MacMillan
Miserere
The performance of “The Reproaches” receives the generous support of The Sanders Society.