Blythburgh Church at sunset plays host to another iconic Festival happening: the first live performance of this extraordinary programme in which the spoken word transforms into song.

EXAUDI is one of the world’s leading vocal ensembles for new music. This expertly crafted new programme, receiving its first live performance today, intertwines music from five centuries apart: the Renaissance Arcadelt and the contemporary James Weeks, throwing light and revelation on each other.

Its theme is the discovering, or awakening, of the sensual and erotic power of the spoken word, and its transformation into song, through the love poetry of Petrarch (1304–1374) and his later imitators. A music of beginnings, of brief glances and tentative flowerings, planted in Italian Renaissance soil. The work looks back to the reticent, emerging expressivity of the earliest madrigals, to the attuning of lyric poetry to vocal sound in Petrarch, and to the way these new-old powers enable the artist to trace with more electric precision the contours of desire.

EXAUDI
Sophie Appleton violin
James Weeks conductor