This Christmas, York’s National Centre for Early Music offers audiences the chance to celebrate the festive season from the comfort of home with a host of concerts from the atmospheric medieval surroundings of St Margaret’s Church available to enjoy online.
York Christmas at Home
Following the success of the York Early Music Festival last July the NCEM presents York Christmas at Home Friday 11 – Sunday 13 December, a weekend festival of concerts, which will be available on demand until 6 January 2021.
The programme features many of our favourite artists who have worked tirelessly to deliver this joyful selection of music, guaranteed to lift the spirits. The concerts include works by Bach, Mozart, Handel, Vivaldi, Purcell, Monteverdi, Dowland and many others, with harpsichords, recorders, lutes, trumpets, oboes, theorbos and glorious voices, plus verse by John Donne, George Herbert and others.
A festival pass is just £50 and includes all nine concerts. Ticketholders will be able to enjoy the concerts throughout the Christmas period until 6 January 2021. Individual concerts are £10.
Artists featured are:
- The Marian Consort in a programme of vocal music from Renaissance Italy
- the Chiaroscuro Quartet performing Mozart’s late Prussian Quartets
- Palisander with their Mischief and Merriment programme
- Illyria Consort -seasonal music for the Nativity from across Europe
- singers Bethany Seymour, Helen Charlston& Frederick Long exploring the theatrical genius of Purcell and John Blow with harpsichordist Peter Seymour
- theorboist Matthew Wadsworth & cellist Kate Bennet Wadsworth share an extravaganza of Venetian music
- Spiritato! presents The Leipzig Legacy with music by Bach and Fasch
- Steven Devine continues to share Bach’s Preludes & Fugues: Book 3
- Stile Antico complete the weekend with a return to the Renaissance for their very own Nine Lessons and Carols.
Dr Delma Tomlin MBE said:
“The York Early Music Christmas Festival was created in 1997 to introduce audiences to the extraordinary wealth of music associated with Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, from the Medieval to the Baroque, intertwined with the sagas, stories and tales of the north. This year I’m delighted to be able to carry on the tradition, welcoming audiences to our beautiful home, St Margaret’s Church. I’m also thrilled to spice things up, introducing our online festival York Christmas at Home, an array of amazing music, which can be enjoyed well beyond Christmas and into Twelfth Night.”
