The Elysian Singers – Director Sam Laughton

Saturday 6 March 2027, 7.30pm

The Elysian Singers invite you on a journey across five centuries of choral music, where the voices of the past resonate in the present, exploring how the same words can inspire profoundly different musical worlds.

Old and new meet in striking dialogue as contemporary composers revisit texts that have inspired composers from the Renaissance to the present day – Ed Driver and Kerensa Briggs set the same words as Palestrina and Sheppard, while new commissions from James Cave and James Else reimagine John Donne’s Batter My Heart and Andrea Gabrieli’s Maria stabat ad monumentum.

Programme

Joanna Marsh: Batter My Heart
James Cave: Batter My Heart
Giovanni Palestrina: Assumpta est Maria a 6
Ed Driver: Assumpta est Maria
John Sheppard: Media vita
Kerensa Briggs: Media vita

Andrea Gabrieli: Maria stabat
James Else: Maria stabat
Eric Whitacre: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
James Woodhall: When darkness descends
Giovanni Gabrieli: Jubilate Deo
Joanna Marsh: now i lay (with everywhere around)