Live, Video: Kritiken zu klassischen Konzerten, Opern, Ballett und Tanz finden | Durham

The Sixteen's 40th anniversary choral pilgrimage mixes Tudor music from the treasure trove of the Eton Choirbook with music that hadn't been written when the group were founded, including a striking new work by James MacMillan.

The Sixteen's Choral Pilrimage dissolves the boundaries between old and new, sacred and profane with striking performances of music by Cornysh and Britten. 

English Touring Opera's triple bill of early Baroque miniatures promised an intruiging evening but failed up to expectations. 

Massive pieces of Tudor polyphony, sung with captivating intensity by The Sixteen and Harry Christophers as their 2014 Choral Pilgrimage comes to Durham Cathedral.

Fantasias for viol trio performed by members of Phantasm illustrate the inventiveness of England's best composers from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Orlando Consort demonstrate with intelligence, wit and style, why they think Guillaume du Machaut and Guillaume Dufay rank among the greatest composers in western music.

Durham University’s concert series Musicon has been moving around different venues in the city over the last few years, and this year has been putting on concerts in the College chapel of St Hild and St Bede.

The medieval garden was an enchanted place, a place where the beauties of nature took on formal and symbolic qualities, and the perfect setting for the coded artifice of courtly love.

It’s a long way from modern Durham to renaissance Venice, from a cold winter evening in a small northern English city to a spring morning in one of the richest and most powerful cities the world has ever seen – but Paul McCreesh’s imaginative reconstruction of a Venetian Doge’s coronation mass made the leap almost instantaneous.

In my notes for this evening’s concert by Renaissance, a chamber choir founded by the young singer, conductor and composer Ben Rowarth, one word kept recurring – “thoughtful”. This was a programme that had been carefully put together, and which was performed without any unnecessary flashiness or attempts to impress.

A competition for young composers run by the National Centre for Early Music may perhaps, at first glance, sound like a contradiction, but the winning pieces, performed tonight by the Tallis Scholars in Durham Cathedral, acknowledged the glories of early polyphonic choral music whilst conveying their composers’ own distinct musical ideas.

The anthems and service settings of Charles Villiers Stanford form part of the core repertory of Anglican choral music; from the grandest cathedrals to the smallest parish churches, it’s probably safe to say that on any given Sunday, you will find Stanford’s music being sung somewhere.

The fifteenth-century French composer Guillaume Dufay straddles the musical boundary between the Medieval and the Renaissance. Working in France and Italy, writing secular and sacred music, sometimes to his own verses, he seems to have had a finger in every musical pie, and this evening’s concert by the Orlando Consort illustrated his pivotal role in the evolution of later Renaissance styles.

This year, The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage features the work of just one man, Tomás Luis de Victoria, one of the greatest composers of church music of the Renaissance.

A concert of songs by obscure Russian and Soviet composers, given as part of a conference in the University of Durham’s music department had the potential to be a somewhat dry and academic affair, but this was not the case in this evening’s spirited performance by the Ukrainian soprano Natalia Kompaniyets, and pianist Patrick Zuk.

It has been nearly twenty years since the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek released their first recording, Officium, in which the austere harmonies of medieval sacred music sung by the male voice quartet were augmented by Garbarek’s beautiful, freewheeling saxophone melodies.

The symbolism of plants and images of the garden are abundant in medieval and renaissance art, and this evening’s Musicon concert by Jacob Heringman and Faye Newton celebrated not just the imagined gardens of Elizabethan poetry, but also a real garden.

Mozart’s penultimate opera, La Clemenza di Tito is a curious work; probably the least known of his major operas, it is heavy on the recitative and lacks any “big tunes”, but it has a fascinating and timeless plot, which offers moments of high drama and eloquently depicts the loneliness of the supreme ruler.

Hearing a work when the composer is in the audience always adds something to the occasion and the performance, and we’re fortunate in Durham that this seems to happen quite frequently. This evening’s concert by the Allegri String Quartet, held in the music department as part of the University’s Musicon series included the première of Anthony Payne’s String Quartet No.

Visiting Durham Cathedral as part of a month long festival of the music of Sir John Stainer, the choir of Magdalen College Oxford put together an imaginative programme of English choral music, featuring music not just by Stainer but also composers who influenced him, his contemporaries and his successors.

Generally when we think of the first great flowering of English church music, our minds go to the giants of the Tudor age – Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons and their contemporaries. But as we learned this evening in the company of the Orlando Consort, the rich tradition of English choral music has even earlier origins, back in the priories of the Middle Ages.

In his introductory talk before The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage concert in Durham Cathedral, conductor Harry Christophers explained that the original idea of their Choral Pilgrimage series was to bring the glories of English church music back into the buildings for which the pieces had been written.

Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, Durham Cathedral and Sir John Eliot Gardiner – a glorious combination of music and architecture, in the hands of a man who made his name bringing the Vespers out of obscurity and into their well-deserved place in the concert repertoire.