Feasting on medieval music with the Orlando Consort at Spitalfields Music Summer Festival 2013

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.

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.

La formation italienne et le pianiste français ont fait étalage de leur habileté dans un programme intégralement russe.

Magnifiquement recréée par Alice Julien-Laferrière et son ensemble, la musique de Biber est apparue dans toute son originalité : vivante, mouvante, presque organique, respirant à travers ses tensions et ses passions.