Chalice Consort presents "Window of a Pious Age"

"Window of a Pious Age" will feature Guest Director, Jeremy Summerly, Royal Academy, London; featuring music by John Sheppard and Simone Molinaro.

2015 marks the assumed 500th anniversary of the birth of the English composer John Sheppard and the 400th anniversary of the death of the Italian composer Simone Molinaro. Sheppard worked in Oxford and in London and wrote gloriously expansive Latin-texted music for use at the court of Queen Mary, daughter of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Molinaro's professional life was colorful, not just because he wrote sensitively crafted vocal music, but because his uncle was murdered when he was Director of Music at Genoa Cathedral, and because Molinaro made editions of the music of Carol Gesualdo, an Italian nobleman who murdered his wife and her lover in cold blood.

Both Sheppard and Molinaro embody the simultaneously decadent and fragile spirit of the Renaissance, and their music is a window on an age that was self-indulgently pious and viscerally concerned with ecclesiastical beauty.