Passion Music from the Eton Choirbook

The St Mathew Passion by Richard Davy and Stabat Mater by John Browne, two masterpieces of early English polyphony from the late 15th-century Eton Choirbook.

The Eton Choirbook is one of England's finest collections of polyphonic church music, and Richard Davy, Informator Choristarum at Magdalen College Oxford, one of the more significant composers represented in it. The musical style of his four-voice St Mathew Passion is an unusually dramatic work for its date,  and the brilliance and originality in its musical conception suggests a level of performance that must have been quite stunning, rivaling the best of any period in England’s long and glorious choral tradition.  This work will be performed with John Browne’s superb setting of the Stabat Mater, also from the Eton Choirbook with its characteristic soaring treble lines, vibrant syncopations, and flashes of florid writing with rare, but highly effective, homophonic passages.