Medieval greats - Guillaume du Machaut and Guillaume Dufay

Amidst all the hustle and bustle, the humming and buzzing of post-work Friday-night drinkers lining the sun-kissed streets of Spitalfields, who’d have thought that in the church at the very heart of that lively London area would be a man, standing alone, singing music written 800 years ago? Music from another human-inhabited world, so alien to our modern-day, Commercial Street lives, and yet still

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.

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.

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.

Die Sächsische Staatskapelle und ihr Chefdirigent Daniele Gatti gastieren in der Alten Oper Frankfurt. Sie brillieren mit einem Programm, welches die französische und deutsche Vielfalt der Romantik auslotet.

Zum Abschluss der 10. Festivalausgabe unter Ausrichtung Simon Pickels lösten Ensemble und Solistin Boud den Wunsch des Veranstalters so ein, dass jener und Gäste sich nach baldiger Wiederholung sehnen.