Toward the Dawn

We were delighted to mark the end of lockdown in 2021 with a UK tour of our programme Toward the Dawn. We are enormously grateful to Tom Corran for his generous support for this project.

Toward the Dawn charts a course from twilight to sunrise, echoing both the rhythms of church liturgy and the medieval experience of night, seductive and unsettling in equal measure. Taverner’s mighty Ave Dei Patris filia (based on a chant for Matins) stands at the end of a delicious sequence of sacred music, chansons and madrigal, by such masters as Byrd, Lassus, Tallis and Monteverdi. Highlights include Allegri’s Miserere and Nico Muhly’s Gentle Sleep, a haunting setting of words by Shakespeare written especially for Stile Antico. This programme was especially resonant as we looked to the future with renewed hope after a long, dark year.

Our tour began at the Beverley Early Music Festival (28th May), and continued with concerts in London (19th June), Oxford (20th June), for Cambridge Early Music (29th June), and at Dartington Summer School (28th/29th July), Suffolk’s Roman River Festival (16th September), Leamington Music (5 October), Bedford Music Club (7 October) and Tonbridge Music Club (9 October).