In Praise of Music: Songs, Sounds and Saint Cecilia

We celebrate music itself, with a cornucopia of songs and sounds from the Renaissance in the 16th century, through to the 20th.

These are pieces which were composed in praise of music, or its patron saint Cecilia.

Orlando Lassus, and Thomas Tomkins loudly hail music's divinity; Wood and Walton lament its brevity; Elgar delights in its sweetness and in Byrd's exuberant setting of Psalm 150 with its invocation of trumpets, drums, strings, cymbals and more, we above all rejoice in music's ability to get us excited! In the second half, we present three pieces of increasing scale, in praise of the patron saint of music, St Cecilia, with the work of two British composers writing more than 400 years apart, Peter Phillips and Benjamin Britten, both equally inspired.