The Camden Choir brings an exciting 2016–17 season to a close by venturing out of London to perform in the glorious setting of St Mary’s church at Hambleden in the Thames Valley. The choir’s concert on June 25 will form part of the Hambleden music festival; this is a warmly anticipated repeat visit for the choir, which took a programme of renaissance music to the festival for the first time in June 2013. The choir will be conducted as usual by its founder and musical director, Julian Williamson, and accompanied on the organ by Edward Tambling.
This year’s programme explores late Renaissance and early Baroque music from Germany and Flanders. In typical Camden Choir style, lesser known composers feature alongside their better known contemporaries. Heinrich Schütz, the dominant composer of seventeenth century Germany is represented here by three double-choir works: the Deutsches Magnificat and two psalm settings, whose glorious antiphonal effects reflect the influence of his Venetian teacher, Giovanni Gabrielli. The choir will also perform works by two other seventeenth century German composers: Jacob Praetorius II and Johann Hermann Schein. Praetorius’ wedding motets (reconstructed by music scholars after the originals were all but destroyed by bombing in the Second World War) are lively and sensual settings of words from the Song of Songs; while Schein’s motet Maria Magdalena is just one example of an extensive repertoire of church music composed during his short lifetime. Moving to Flanders and back in time to the sixteenth century, the final item to be performed is the Missa Paschalis by one of the greatest of Renaissance composers, Orlandus Lassus.
