Masters of the Renaissance - music by Byrd / Weelkes | Oxford Pro Musica Singers

The resonant surrounds of Exeter College Chapel will be the ideal setting for Oxford Pro Musica Singers’ feast of sacred and secular music from the English Renaissance. Primarily celebrating two of its great masters who died 400 years ago this year, William Byrd and Thomas Weelkes, the programme will also feature music by contemporaries such as Tallis and Gibbons.

William Byrd is doubtless the more familiar of our two main stars, and we include a number of favourites, from the intense and reverent ‘Ave verum corpus’ to the exuberant Easter motet ‘Haec dies’. However we also hope to introduce you to some lesser-known gems, such as his deeply felt lament on the death of Thomas Tallis and the sprightly madrigal ‘Though Amaryllis dance’, closing with that majestic paean of praise, ‘Laudibus in sanctis’.

Thomas Weelkes, though, will have his moment: we open the concert with his wonderfully declamatory 'Hosanna to the son of David' and hope to demonstrate his considerable range and skill, from his poignant and little-known setting of ‘When David heard’ to the energetic word-painting of ‘As Vesta was’.

Complemented by such jewels as Tallis’s ‘O Nata Lux’ and Gibbons’s ‘Hosanna to the son of David’, the concert will surely be a fitting tribute to two of England’s great composers.