Venue: Durham University: Music Department

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.

A concert of songs by obscure Russian and Soviet composers, given as part of a conference in the University of Durham’s music department had the potential to be a somewhat dry and academic affair, but this was not the case in this evening’s spirited performance by the Ukrainian soprano Natalia Kompaniyets, and pianist Patrick Zuk.

The symbolism of plants and images of the garden are abundant in medieval and renaissance art, and this evening’s Musicon concert by Jacob Heringman and Faye Newton celebrated not just the imagined gardens of Elizabethan poetry, but also a real garden.

Hearing a work when the composer is in the audience always adds something to the occasion and the performance, and we’re fortunate in Durham that this seems to happen quite frequently. This evening’s concert by the Allegri String Quartet, held in the music department as part of the University’s Musicon series included the première of Anthony Payne’s String Quartet No.

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.