Join us for a celebration of music from round these islands. Voix de Vivre's summer concert is a snapshot of wonderful British choral music from the 16th century to the present day.
Thomas Tallis, William Byrd and the less prominent William Mundy were leading composers during the turbulent Tudor years in England,writing sacred music both in Latin and English while successfully negotiating the dangerous religious tensions which so characterised this age. Dependent upon royal patronage, Henry Purcell was pre-eminent during the 17th century Restoration under the Stuarts. He was a composer of unrivalled style and panache who died aged 34.
After Handel’s death in 1759, musical composition in the UK was superseded by the great composers in Germany, Austria and France. It was not until the late 19th century that the next set of influential writers in Britain really emerged from Oxford and Cambridge and the Royal College of Music in London. Stanford, Parry, Holst and Vaughan Williams were close colleagues, the younger pair pupils of the older ones. The most internationally recognised of this turn-of–the-century group, however, was the comparative outsider and self-taught composer, Edward Elgar.
The 20th century saw huge technological change and great upheaval. In its way, musical composition reflected this. Britten and Tippett lived through the eye of much of this and they remain among the most vividly individual British musical talents of the last 80 years. James MacMillan and Judith Weir, both Scots, continue in this current century to carry forward the choral medium with sparkling originality.