Songs of sweetness and suavity A concert focusing on the first great body of music to rework existing songs, from the years around 1500. At the courts of northern Italy and in the first published songbooks, settings of courtly love poetry were treated to highly inventive reworkings, sometimes with elegant textless parts suitable for the newly developed consort of viols. The Rose Consort plays a unique set of viols derived from a Bolognese painting of 1497 by Isabella d’Este’s court painter.

[Martha McLorian] “a radiant soloist .. a powerful, intense performance” The Guardian