Oeuvre: Adieu ces bons vins de Lannoys

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 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.