Gothic Voices: Mary, Star of the Sea

As part of their 2014-2015 Choral season, Belgravia’s Cadogan Hall plays host to the sensational Gothic Voices for an evening of medieval English vocal music. With a twenty-five song line up of songs that all celebrate the Virgin Mary in her many aspects, this promises to be one of the year’s most stirring and complete recitations of music from the Middle Ages.
Much of the program is given over to anonymous settings of Biblical and mystical texts, including a thirteenth-century Ave Maria. They are joined by Walter Frye’s fifteenth-century Ave Regina, a motet so famed in its time that it appears with notation in three religious paintings. Polyphonic master John Dunstaple’s Ave maria stella is the paradigmic late medieval motet, soothing and consolatory whilst retaining a sparse majesty. A piece from Godric of Finchale – mystic, hermit and unofficial saint – is the evening’s earliest song, and one of its most austerely beatific.
The line-up also includes three modern settings of medieval texts, bridging the past and present. Arvo Pärt’s Most Holy Mother of God is hauntingly sombre, while Joanne Metcalf brings characteristic colour to Il nom del bel fior, set from a passage in Dante’s Paradiso. Contemporary composer Andrew Smith, who has written for Norway’s Trio Mediaevel and the New York Polyphony, will be honoured with a world premiere of his Stond wel Moder.
Gothic Voices specialize in unaccompanied vocal music from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. Founded in 1981 by Cambridge Professor of Medieval Music Christopher Page, they have risen to become amongst the world’s foremost interpretors of medieval music. With a consistent line-up of five performers, including the unsurpassed oratorio specialist Catherine King, and a host of acclaimed guests, they have recorded definite versions of Guillaume de Machaut, Hildegard von Bingen, Francesco Landini and many others. Three of their CDs have won the Gramophone Award for best recording.