The Rose, the Lily and the Whortleberry: The Orlando Consort

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.

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.

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.

As gifts to the Philarmonia's 80th birthday season, Nicola Benedetti gives a barnstorming account of Elgar's Violin Concerto before Cristian Mӑcelaru gets emotionally drained by La Mer.

The Seattle Symphony offers an enchanting evening immersed in the joy and brilliance of both the young and the mature genius of Felix Mendelssohn.