Orlando Tenebrae

The stunning and thought-provoking surroundings of Holy Cross Priory Church in the centre of Leicester’s New Walk provide an apposite setting for this programme of music for Lent and Passiontide. At the centre of our sequence is James Weeks startling work Orlando Tenebrae, written between 2006 and 2010, which highlights man’s capacity for inhumanity towards itself through the reading of four secular texts, set alongside choral invocations of three Tenebrae Responsories.

We are delighted to be joined for this performance by the Very Rev’d David Montieth, Dean of Leicester, who will read these poems from Fire in the Soul – a collection which muses on a theme of human rights that was published by New Internationalist – amongst our Weeksian choral interjections.

We preface this original and unique work with other settings of the Tenebrae by Orlando di Lasso and more generalised music for Passiontide by Thomas Tallis and John Sanders.