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This Cheltenham Festival concert featured three British string quartets by Hugh Wood, Michael Nyman and Giles Swayne. Swayne and Wood were both present at the concert and gave an introductory talk providing context for their works. Swayne said in the talk that ‘music should be unpredictable to keep the listener interested’.

In most concert listings, premières seem to be thrown in as a one-off to offset a relatively risk-free billing. In this Cheltenham Music Festival concert, this was not the case. With no less than five premières in an evening of seven choral works, those present could be assured that they were hearing something new.

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.