Crouch End Festival Chorus: Spem in Alium

This entirely unaccompanied concert features a glorious collection of works ranging from the 16th century to 2014. Tallis’s forty-part motet Spem in alium is an iconic masterpiece of Tudor England, and Tallis was organist at Waltham Abbey, one of the performance venues. Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor is very much ‘mock Tudor’ – a 20th-century work which looks back to an earlier age.

Bernard Hughes’s Salve Regina is a Crouch End Festival Chorus commission (sponsored by soprano Denise Haddon in memory of her husband Paul, who sang with the chorus for many years). John Tavener died recently – and the pieces in this concert are two of his most famous and magnificent for a cappella chorus. As a quirky addition to this programme, the choir will perform Orlando Gough’s arrangement of a Paul Anka song made famous by Buddy Holly, It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.