Keble Early Music Festival: Arise, My Love
We’re delighted to be appearing at the 2025 Keble Early Music Festival for a concert presenting more new research on music from convents established expressly for English Catholic women across France, the Low Countries, and Portugal, which grew in size and number over the 17th and early 18th centuries. The theme is divine love, and the pieces chosen reflect the variety of ways early modern English Catholic women religious understood this love as encompassing physical, spiritual, sexual, and psychological feelings.
The first set features early 17th-century polyphony for the profession of a nun published by organists at the English Benedictine convent in Brussels (Peter Philipps and Richard Dering). These settings have yet to be recorded in their original voicing (i.e., for upper or equal voice parts). The second set features devotional songs for solo voice and continuo in English, Dutch, Italian, and French on the theme of intimate, individualised love for Christ from mid-17th century manuscripts and print publications used at exiled English convents. This set will also feature some secular Italian arias (such as ‘O cara spene’ from Handel’s Il Floridante ) that appear in music manuscripts recently identified as used by exiled English nuns in northern France. The third set returns to liturgical music for nuns’ professions at exiled English convents, with anonymous settings of music for profession from late 17th-/early 18th-century manuscripts with links to exiled English convents.
Tickets will be available soon through Tickets Oxford. To find out more about this year’s Keble Early Music Festival, visit the link below
Ceremonies of Carols
Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols, composed in 1942 for upper voices and harp, creates an imagined service of seasonal hymns, songs, and carols from the late Middle Ages, weaving texts that are at times joyful, melancholic, wistful, and longing with music that is profoundly modern in outlook even as it evokes centuries long gone by.
As a primarily upper-voice ensemble as interested in the history of historical re-enactment as we are with re-enactment itself, we will be taking inspiration from Britten's blending of texts from different eras and styles with repertoire as unfamiliar now as Britten's medieval texts were then.
In the first half of the concert, we will be using music from English convents in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries to recreate the Christmas ceremonies of a different age, exploring the range of emotions that accompany the birth of Christ, from awe and wonder to joy to the knowledge of sadness that the Nativity story necessitates.
The programme will include readings from life-writing of exiled English nuns describing secular rituals, liturgies, and other memories of Advent and Christmas at the convents, before a complete performance of Britten's timeless classic.
Wounding Harmonies: Baroque Music from exiled English Convents
The Basilinda Consort returns to Christ Church Cathedral this August!
Carols at the Convent
From the flashiest French masterpieces and virtuosic English motets to gentle Dutch lullabies – alongside some familiar favourites – enter a wonderful musical world and join us for a musical journey through early modern England, France, and the Low Countries at Christmas, all within the former priory of Christ Church Cathedral.