Oxford’s renowned early-music consort Contrapunctus, directed by Waverley Fellow in Music Professor Owen Rees, recreates the musical world surrounding one of the great royal marriages of the Renaissance: the wedding of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, and Isabella of Portugal in Seville in 1526. At the heart of the programme is Cristóbal de Morales’s Missa L’homme armé, a work that may have been sung at the wedding itself, alongside Nicolas Gombert’s sumptuous Veni electa mea – ‘Come, my chosen one’ – and music by composers associated with the Spanish royal court and Seville Cathedral.

The programme also reaches back into Isabella’s musical inheritance through Josquin’s Missa Ave maris stella, preserved in a manuscript associated with the marriage of her parents, Manuel I of Portugal and Maria of Aragon. Music by Francisco de Peñalosa, the senior musician at Seville Cathedral at the time of the wedding, completes a programme weaving together marriage, dynasty and devotion at the heart of sixteenth-century Europe.

Join us for a musical celebration of Charles & Isabel and the extraordinary meeting of Spanish, Portuguese and imperial cultures surrounding the royal wedding of 1526.

Seriously, startlingly good.

Gramophone

Programme

Cristóbal de Morales
Missa L’homme armé (Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei)
Regina cæli lætare

Nicolas Gombert
Veni electa mea

Francisco de Peñalosa
Nigra sum sed formosa
Agnus Dei II

Josquin des Prez
Missa Ave maris stella (Credo)