Based on Gibbons’ The Silver Swan, this programme celebrates bird song from English and Italian composers from William Byrd to Luca Marenzio. From the darkness of pre-dawn through dawn chorus, to the end of the day when sleep can be elusive, English and Italian masterpieces sit alongside each other.

In sixteenth-century Italy, Claudio Monteverdi fundamentally changed the future of music, demonstrated in a rebirth of the madrigal style. This programme features music by Monteverdi, Marenzio and Giaches de Wert from that crucial turning point in the genre of the Italian madrigal, alongside examples from the English school which developed its own distinctive style inspired by the Italian masters, as shown here by Gibbons, Ravenscroft and Morley.

Our programme title ‘Dawn Chorus’ comes from the prominence of the emotional power of the voices of songbirds in literature from Italian, French and English writers. Thousands of poems and songs have been written in ode to the nightingale, for example, as lovesick protagonists look for empathy for their torments in the nature surrounding them. The term ‘madrigal’ originally meant a simple poem, not a musical composition, but these poems were so ready to be set to music that the term soon came to mean both the musical composition and the poem.