The Orlando Consort - Brighton Early Music Festival

Guillaume de Machaut was the most brilliant and innovative European composer of the 14th century, a driving force in the controversial ars nova movement, as important to the development of music as the introduction of perspective was to the progress of painting. Machaut’s work in the polyphonic forms of the ballade and the rondeau and his mixture of the sacred and the secular were revolutionary: his Messe de Nostre Dame was the first mass cycle to be composed by a single author. The mass - written for four voices - is a textbook example of medieval counterpoint, first performed in 1360 in Rheims Cathedral. Machaut was a pioneer - a number of his forms are commonplace in music into the 16th century - but can still be appreciated on its own terms.

Tonight’s performance of the Messe, in St John Sub Castro, is by the award-winning Orlando Quartet as part of the Brighton Early Music Festival, which runs throughout July. Joined on this occasion by the BREMF Singers, the concert will also feature Scattered Rhymes, a new companion work for the Mass by the young composer Tarik O’Regan. O’Regan is one of the UK’s leading lights in contemporary classical music, who is currently working on an operatic version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Something to be looked forward to: we love the sound of mezzo-sopranos in the morning. DL