As we welcome our new music director, Gerard Lim, and commemorate the 500th anniversary of Palestrina's birth, we celebrate the resonance of his music from his own time through to today. Palestrina took the plainchant hymn Aeterna Christi Munera as the basis for his mass setting, whilst his motet Sicut Cervus is the inspiration for contemporary Italian composer Lorenzo Donati's 16-part motet, Sicut Cervus - Around Palestrina. James MacMillan's works often draw on Catholic liturgy and chant for their basic formal and melodic material, along with diverse other influences, with polyphony recalling Renaissance church composers.

Johannes Brahms both studied and edited the music of earlier composers including Palestrina. Our concert finds Brahms in secular mode with the earliest of his sets of secular part-songs, here for six-part chorus. And finally, our web of influences stretch to the Irish composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and his set of arrangements of traditional melodies from his homeland.