Saturday 1 December 2007 at 7:30pm
Sherborne Abbey

Monteverdi’s glorious Vespers for the Blessed Virgin of 1610 is a magnificent setting of a complete liturgical Office in which the composer, disgruntled with his employer, set out to display the full range of his talents. The result is an astonishing variety of virtuosic music in many different styles, with a blistering array of acrobatic solo movements, choruses for multiple choirs and a host of different instruments.

Published in Venice, images of the huge splendour of St Mark’s are never far away and the collection was instrumental in ensuring Monteverdi the post of Maestro di Cappella there in 1613, where he remained for the rest of his life.

A rare chance to hear a complete performance, in a setting to rival St Mark’s, with an ensemble of top period instrumentalists. Hercules, the musicians from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, accompanied us at our Christmas 2006 concert and took the Abbey by storm!