Above the stars: the genius of the English verse anthem |The Renaissance Singers

Join us for a summer's evening of emotive, evocative and joyful sacred music by the astonishingly talented generation of English composers that came to maturity in the decades around 1600. During this period composers of Anglican church music came to write more ‘verse’ music — for viol consort, solo voices and choir — than full anthems. The burgeoning idiom permitted more vivid text setting, new dramatic possibilities and an expanded range of scoring colours.

Among established masterpieces by Gibbons and Tomkins we are excited to include unknown anthems by Michael East, and to be giving a rare performance of John Milsom’s reconstruction of Tomkins’s O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance — a raw cry of protest at events unfolding in Worcester during the mid-17th century. The choral items will be interspersed with Fantasias and In nomines by Byrd, Gibbons and East, played by the world-class Chelys Consort.