Man playing a viola and looking down while he moves the bow across the strings; black and white image with an overlaid half graphic of a close up the viola strings.

22 – 25 Jun

The Beginning of the World

The two great gardens of English music, separated by two centuries, are the theme of this concert experience co-curated by Sophie Rowell and the incomparable Genevieve Lacey.

The beautiful, intricate music of Elizabethan and Stuart England is an escape to a world far from our own. In this first flowering of English music, composer William Byrd sowed the seeds with his round, 'The Beginning of the World', and the sublime artistry of Purcell burst forth. When Elgar, Walton and others began to plant the second great garden in more recent times, the earlier golden age was never far from their minds.

For decades, audiences and fellow artists have been drawn to Genevieve Lacey’s unique artistic visions, which reimagine music from diffuse contexts as wholes greater than the sum of their parts.