A celebration in music of the most sacred and joyful time of the year!
Join us as we share with you an extraordinary selection of festive and reflective music, gathered to bring to mind the light of church candles, fires in hearths and the rituals of giving and receiving over the centuries; and bringing together these symbols of warmth, hope and togetherness, imagination and wonder in this coldest and quietest part of the year.
Natalie Klouda (violin) Eleanor Turner (harp) Milos Milivojević (accordion) and Clare O’Connell (cello) present unconventional settings of music by composers such as Antonio Vivaldi, Giovanni Giralomo Kapsberger, Henry Purcell, Dietrich Buxtehude, Thomas Morley, Nicola Fiorenza and more in this most rich and unusual of sound worlds.
Ductia: from Cantiga de Santa Maria by Alfonso X El Sabio
Arranged here by Clare O’Connell, Eleanor Turner and Joe Danks for cello harp and percussion.
The Canticles of Holy Mary are 420 poems with musical notation, written in the medieval Galician-Portuguese language during the reign of Alfonso X of Castile (1221-1284) and often attributed to him.
In his Ars musicae, Parisian music theorist Johannes de Grocheio describes the ductia as a “light and joyful” instrumental to be danced to:
“they arouse the spirit of man to move decorously according to the art which they call dancing”.
This piece was made “so that it may lead and give joy” and we are including it in our concert to celebrate Advent due to its devotional aspect