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From the oppressed Catholic minority of 16th-century England to contemporary settings, The Gesualdo Six bring their Wishing Tree programme to Auckland. 

The Sixteen contribute intimate Music for Reflection to Voces8's Live from London series.

VOCES8 perform choral music spanning 800 years, including a BBC commission from Alexia Sloane, with great energy, articulation and virtuosity in an impressive Proms debut at Cadogan Hall.

A concert at the Andrzej Markowski International Wratislavia Cantans Festival that was anything but traditional or predictable.

Music from Anne Boleyn's Songbook in a highly evocative and expertly performed programme at Cadogan Hall. 

In a celestial choir-off, one could imagine the Tallis Scholars giving the Seraphims and Cherubims a run for their money.

The Hilliard Ensemble celebrated their fortieth birthday at the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival, at St Leonard's Church, Shoreditch.

The City of London Festival this year is ambitiously programmed, with a number of common themes running through the events.

Singing polyphonic music requires a specific sound. To be truly effective there must be a beautifully rounded and well blended choral sound, but at the same time the individual lines must be clearly decipherable within the overall texture. This is a balance that The Tallis Scholars seem to find effortless.

Premièring a new touring programme at their home church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, early music vocal ensemble Stile Antico treated us to a concert centred around the music of the Hapsburg courts of the late 15th and 16th centuries.

It would seem that Easter has come early to Oslo. Friday marked the opening of the Oslo International Church Music Festival, a festival that this year is devoted to the ever-paschal theme of the passion. The opening concert was held in the Oslo Cathedral and was sung by the British vocal ensemble The Tallis Scholars.The concert focused on passion, in both senses of the word.

The theme of tonight’s concert, revealed the programme notes, was that of “marking time and preserving timeless values” – Christmas being a season that connects the past with the present.

By calling this year’s Choral Pilgrimage tour The Earth Resounds and including excerpts from a piece known as the “Earthquake mass”, Harry Christophers and The Sixteen created an expectation of drama and excitement before they’d sung a single note.

Unless you’re actually performing it liturgically, it’s very difficult to know what to do with sacred music these days. The masses of Palestrina, the motets of Byrd, the cantatas of Bach – all seem to merit our attention today, but not for the religious reasons for which they were originally written.

Trendy titles and taglines are more or less a given at classical concerts nowadays, but that doesn’t prevent me feeling a twinge of resentment each time pieces are pigeon-holed into a concert ‘narrative’. Thus it was with a certain trepidation that I headed to Southwark Cathedral for ‘The Knight and the Lady’, a concert of sacred vocal music performed by the New Renaissance Voices.