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We are very much looking forward to our next concert, English Choral Masterpieces from the 16th to 20th Century, with the Mayfield Consort.

https://mayfieldfestival.co.uk/events/english-choral-masterpieces/

Monday 2 May 2022 St Dunstan’s Church Mayfield, 7.30pm

Jeremy Summerly conducts the Oxford Camerata and Mayfield Consort in works by Purcell, Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Tavener and Thomas Tallis – Spem in Alium.

Oxford Camerata and the Mayfield Consort join forces again for a mammoth 500-year celebration of British choral music, bookended by two performances of Thomas Tallis’s 40-part motet. It will open the programme sung to its English text, ‘Sing and glorify’, and will end the concert in its original Latin version, ‘Spem in alium’. This surround-sound piece began life as a challenge to the middle-aged Tallis. An Italian composer, most probably Alessandro Striggio, brought his 40-part motet to England in 1567 and the Duke of Norfolk asked whether an English composer could compose anything as impressive. Tallis rose to the challenge and wrote something even better. The filling in this Tallis sandwich is a diet of choral and folk music dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries by the finest British composers of their day.

This choral concert is kindly sponsored by Mr and Mrs Simon and Caroline Tindall.

50th anniversary Mayfield Festival 2020 headline concert on Bank Holiday Monday 4 May 2020. Oxford Camerata will be performing in St Dunstan’s Church at 7.30 pm. Save the date – tickets on sale from January 2020.

On 3 January 2015, BBC Radio 3’s CD Review chose Oxford Camerata’s recording of Palestrina’s iconic Mass setting for Pope Marcellus as the best in the current catalogue. The recording was made in the summer of 1991, in spite of the fact that the sound engineer and producer had a car crash on their way to the recording venue and a cement mixer outside Dorchester Abbey held up the recording sessions when they eventually got under way.

June 2012’s BBC Music Magazine hailed Oxford Camerata’s version of Thomas Tallis’s 40-voice motet Spem in alium as ‘The Best Recording’ – “Jeremy Summerly and his impressive Oxford Camerata settle the matter with their interpretation’s vitality and care for the contemplative qualities of Tallis’s polychoral masterwork. The Oxford Camerata crafts an interpretation of true depth.”

Released in November 2011, Oxford Camerata’s performance of the sound track to Will is sumptuous and stirring. The film charts an orphan’s journey across Europe to the 2005 Champions League Final in Istanbul.