'A New Star Shall Arise' will transport you back to the wintry cathedrals and now-ruined abbeys of medieval England for an evening of musical splendour from the Middle Ages. We will perform rare and often surprising musical treasures written for the Christmas season between the 13th and 15th centuries, including the anonymous Missa Veterem Hominem of the mid-15th century, which luckily survives in a manuscript copied not in England, but on the continent. Indeed, the surviving sources of polyphony in England from the late-Middle Ages are far rarer than those on the continent. This is in part due to the fact that, for many centuries, notated polyphony was cultivated and copied mostly within the great English monastic communities, whose libraries were largely destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries from 1536.

The soaring melodies of Sarum plainchant, the energetic drama of 13th- and 14th-century motets and conductus, and the great beauty of 15th-century carols and other settings will all be brought back to life in this very special Christmas programme.