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Andrew Carwood and The Cardinall’s Musick undertake their most ambitious UK tour with the complete Latin works of one of England’s greatest composers, William Byrd (c.1540-1623). With more than 20 concerts planned for 2012, the tour takes in historic locations closely associated with Byrd himself.

This follows the completion of the leading Renaissance vocal ensemble’s multi-award winning 13-CD William Byrd Edition, which won the Gramophone Recording of the Year Award in 2010 - only the second time an early music ensemble has ever received such an accolade. The Cardinall’s Musick was also voted one of the top three choirs in the world in Gramophone’s 2011 survey.

The tour begins in London at the Wigmore Hall (5 March) as part of the William Byrd: Sacred Music Series, to which The Cardinall’s Musick returns for a second tour date in May. It finishes at St John’s, Smith Square (19 December) after taking in high profile venues and festivals across the UK including Winchester Cathedral and Brighton Festival. This magnificent music will be set in context by Andrew Carwood who will introduce each concert.

Byrd has long been one of the country’s best-loved composers, thanks to his powerful and emotive religious works. Whilst his talent brought him fame and a job as a ‘Gentleman of the Chapel Royal’, Byrd led a precarious double life as a recusant Catholic in Reformation England, rubbing shoulders with gunpowder plotters and dissidents yet somehow staying out of prison.

In an extraordinary feature of the tour, The Cardinall’s Musick brings Byrd’s music to historic locations strongly associated with the composer’s life and works. These include two venues in Essex, where Byrd spent the last thirty years of his life: the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Stondon Massey (where Byrd is buried) and Ingatestone Hall, home of the Catholic patron to whom Byrd dedicated his famous Gradualia and where the priest-holes still symbolise the secretive, shadowy origins of this sublime music.

At the heart of this tour is the entire catalogue of Byrd’s Latin sacred music, a rich array of masses and motets that were performed in secret during the composer’s lifetime. His choice of texts was dangerous; an illegal political statement where the Catholic themes of persecution and resilience constantly recur. Audiences can revel in serene masterpieces such as Ave verum corpus, and astonishing emotion statements such as the monumental Infelix ego, which Carwood describes as ‘one of the greatest artistic statements of the sixteenth century’.

This comprehensive focus on Byrd’s music provides a fitting counterpart to next year’s celebrations of his great literary contemporary, William Shakespeare – who himself, scholars suggest, paid tribute to the composer as ‘the Bird of loudest lay’.

Andrew Carwood, who is also Director of Music at St Paul’s Cathedral, says:

‘This is music of the highest quality which has the power to move both the heart and the mind. I find William Byrd’s music to be the most impassioned of all composers across Europe and into the New World. This touring programme gives The Cardinall’s Musick an opportunity to take Byrd around the country, to showcase his passion and to place him in context as the most important musician of the Tudor age.’

Confirmed tour dates:

5 March               Wigmore Hall, London
24 March              St George's Bristol
30 March              Music at Oxford
4 April                  Howard Assembly Room, Leeds
May                     Brighton Festival
17 May                Wigmore Hall, London
7 June                 St David's Cathedral Festival, Pembrokeshire
27 June               St Magnus Festival, Orkney
July                     Lichfield Festival
10 July                Winchester Cathedral
August                 Kilkenny Arts Festival
September           Lammermuir Festival
20 October           Canterbury Festival
Novem                 Arundel Cathedral
19 December        St John's, Smith Square, London

Additional tour venues (dates to be confirmed).