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The Marian Consort, directed by Rory McCleery

Una poesia muta: Art in early Cinquecento Venice is the result of a collaboration between SWR radio, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and The Marian Consort. Specially curated by the Stuttgart museum, Germany's first ever exhibition devoted to Vittore Carpaccio and his contemporaries has inspired The Marian Consort, together with musicologist Prof Tim Shephard, to devise an album to accompany this artistic journey. Being one of the most prominent painters of the Early Renaissance in Venice, Carpaccio is likely to have been acquainted with the music and the composers recorded here, since all have strong links to the city at that time. If some of them are well-known today - Josquin, Jean Mouton, Adrian Willaert - others deserve wider recognition. The Marian Consort and it's director Rory McCleery have assembled a typically fascinating programme, matched with superb singing.

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The Marian Consort, directed by Rory McCleery

Dedicated to contemporary music, A Winged Woman captures The Marian Consort’s pioneering work creating an ambitious and expanding body of new work for vocal ensemble. Featuring seven world premiere recordings from a crop of the UK’s finest composers, including Dani Howard, Electra Perivolaris, and Ben Rowarth alongside works by James MacMillan, Howard Skempton and Rebecca Clarke.

Every purchase you make directly through our website supports our programme of concerts, commissioning, recording and creative engagement.

The Marian Consort, directed by Rory McCleery

In his own time an important music theorist, Lusitano’s reputation and music have both been neglected in ours. As so often with musical figures of the Renaissance, many of the details of his life remain unknown. We can, however, be reasonably confident that he was the first published composer of African heritage. Referred to as ‘pardo’ in one eighteenth-century source, his only surviving printed book of compositions, the Liber primus epigramatum, was issued in Rome in 1551. True to its pioneer spirit as ‘brilliant discoverers, and exponents, of rare repertoire’ (The Observer), The Marian Consort has recorded a carefully chosen programme of these striking and impressive unjustly forgotten works.

The Marian Consort, directed by Rory McCleery | The Illyria Consort, directed by Bojan Čičić

In March 1575, a party led by the Venetian diplomat Giacomo Soranzo set out on a mission to Constantinople. They sailed down the Istrian coast, along the length of present-day Croatia, and on to the Bay of Kotor. Much of the land they passed was the territory of the Serenissima – inhabited by both Italians and Slavs, and of strategic importance since it was exposed to constant Turkish threats from the Balkan hinterland.

The Marian Consort and The Illyria Consort join forces for this imaginative programme of sacred and secular music by composers working along the Dalmatian coast in the decades after Soranzo’s expedition. It was a time in which constant movement of people and trade of goods created linguistic and cultural cross-currents, in contrast to the sharp distinctions encouraged in later centuries by the emergence of modern nation states. Much of this music would have been regarded as Venetian, but the journey points up intriguing differences between the composers and pieces presented, many of them in premiere recordings.

The Marian Consort – Rory McCleery

In the turbulent religious climate of Elizabethan England William Byrd wrote — and, more audaciously, published — a huge amount of music for the Catholic rite, for services which he and his fellow Catholics had to celebrate clandestinely, in the private houses and chapels of sympathetic noblemen.

The cloistered intimacy of those occasions is reflected in The Marian Consort’s performances here, and their programme also explores the more coded ways in which Byrd was able to express his faith and his commitment to the recusant cause: settings of texts which had become associated with Jesuit martyrs, or biblical pleas for divine intervention which took on new, heightened meaning in these times of persecution.

Most moving of all is the motet Infelix ego, with Byrd weaving in homages to a still-intact tradition of Continental composers stretching back a century and a half as the text arcs from dejection and misery to repentance and finally hope, made manifest in music of transformative power.

Read Rory McCleery’s feature in the Guardian.

The Marian Consort, Rory McCleery

Biblical texts of lamentation were embraced by composers of the late Renaissance for their artistic and expressive potential. But in Portugal – a kingdom without a king, its people governed by a foreign power – such settings gave life, as well, to a rich expression of covert political commentary.

Rory McCleery’s ongoing interest in this field of polyphony bears fruit for the first time in a ground-breaking programme. Many of these Portuguese composers are known, if at all, for a very few pieces. Once again, McCleery and his Consort make a clarion call for music that it deserves, and with their advocacy should now receive far wider recognition.

The Marian Consort, Rory McCleery

Celebrating its tenth anniversary with its tenth recording on Delphian, The Marian Consort plays to its twin strengths in a lovingly conceived programme coupling two pillars of Renaissance polyphony with twenty-first-century settings of the same texts, including a newly commissioned Stabat Mater by Gabriel Jackson. A range of subplots – Palestrina’s influence on Wagner, Charles Burney’s collecting of Allegri and Palestrina – make this truly a story of interconnections: a path on which the present’s footsteps constantly overlay the past’s. At the centre is Allegri’s Miserere, whose convoluted reception history itself becomes part of the story and whose performance here fully exploits the world-famous acoustic of Merton College’s chapel.

The Marian Consort originally made its name with the music of the Renaissance. But the group has also worked regularly with living composers for a number of years. This programme of contemporary Marian anthems – many of them commissioned by the ensemble – celebrates a living, developing tradition where the new is always informed by the old, casting fresh, vital light on these ancient words.

Under its founder and director, Rory McCleery, the Marian Consort has given concerts throughout the UK and Europe, features regularly on BBC Radio 3, and is a former ‘Young Artist’ of The Brighton Early Music Festival. This is the their eighth recording for Delphian.

The Marian Consort, Berkeley Ensemble, David Wordsworth

Lennox Berkeley’s Stabat Mater derives from one of the most fertile and inspired periods of his compositional life. A masterpiece, and until now the last of his major works to go unrecorded, it was written for a concert tour by his close friend Benjamin Britten’s English Opera Group; hence the unusual but effective scoring for six solo voices and twelve instrumentalists. Delphian artists The Marian Consort – with five acclaimed discs of early music to their credit – now show their versatility in a cappella and accompanied music by both Lennox and his son Michael Berkeley. They are partnered in the larger works by the Berkeley Ensemble, whose performances are enriched by their intimate knowledge of these composers’ music. The same can be said of conductor David Wordsworth, who has known and worked with both composers, and who here realises a long-cherished ambition to direct this important addition to the catalogue.

The Marian Consort, Rory McCleery

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, has become notorious for the eccentricities of both his life and his music. The gruesome murder of his first wife and her lover in flagrante, his mistreatment of his second wife, his isolation at his family seat and his penchant for masochism and flagellation have all fuelled the ‘myth’ of Gesualdo as madman, deviant and tortured pariah, qualities seen to be replicated in his rule-defying music. Yet his work was admired by his contemporaries, one of them remarking that he was ‘inferior to no other composer, having discovered new inventions of composition adorned with thought and caprice so that all musicians and singers of the world have been given to marvel’.

Marking Gesualdo’s 450th birthday year, this idiomatic and committed reading by Rory McCleery and The Marian Consort of the composer’s five-voice motets invites us to marvel afresh – at their pictorial immediacy, their surprising chromaticism, their melodic word-painting and unique blend of melisma and homophony. Gesualdo turned his prodigious compositional talent to the creation of a collection of pieces that betray his obsession with his own personal sin, remorse and need for absolution. Today, they speak to us as strongly as ever.

The Marian Consort, Rose Consort of Viols, Rory McCleery

John Baldwin was a lay clerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor in 1575 and became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1598. The so-called ‘Baldwin Partbooks’, held at Christ Church, Oxford, were his creation – a very personal collection, representing his individual tastes and interests from a wealth of English and Continental polyphony and consort music.

As in their previous collaboration, an exploration of the similarly conceived partbooks of Robert Dow, the Marian Consort and Rose Consort of Viols have kept faith with Baldwin’s own intentions, bringing to light some of the rarer gems preserved by this great advocate and music-lover and providing the listener with ‘such sweete musicke: as dothe much delite yeelde’. The Marian Consort has to date released four CDs with Delphian Records which have met with considerable critical acclaim. The ensemble’s most recent release, of a Christmas mass and motets by Jean Mouton, Cristóbal de Morales and Annibale Stabile (DCD34145), was ‘Christmas Choice’ in BBC Music magazine.

The Marian Consort, Rory McCleery

A Christmas programme with a difference: Rory McCleery and his acclaimed consort echo the shepherds’ noels through a motet by Jean Mouton which, astonishingly, remained in the repertoire of the Sistine Chapel for over 100 years after its composition around 1515. So famous already by the middle of the century, when Cristóbal de Morales was engaged as a singer in the papal chapel, that Mouton’s motet would form the basis for a mass by Morales; and, later still, a new motet to the same text by Annibale Stabile. A world premiere recording of the latter work crowns this unique programme, drawn from new performing editions by McCleery himself. Taking its name from the Blessed Virgin Mary, a focus of religious devotion in the sacred music of all ages, The Marian Consort is a young, dynamic and internationally-renowned early music vocal ensemble, recognised for its freshness of approach and innovative presentation of a broad range of repertoire. Under its founder and director, Rory McCleery, this ‘astounding’ (The Herald) ensemble has given concerts throughout the UK and Europe, features regularly on BBC Radio 3, and is a former ‘Young Artist’ of The Brighton Early Music Festival.

The Marian Consort, Rory McCleery

Jean Maillard’s life is shrouded in mystery, and his music is rarely heard today. Yet in his own time his works were both influential and widely known: indeed, the musicologist François Lesure held him to be one of the most important French composers of his era.

Who better, then, than Rory McCleery’s Marian Consort to give this composer’s rich and varied output its first dedicated recording? Their characteristically precise and yet impassioned performances bring out both the network of influence in which Maillard’s music participated its Josquin-esque pedigree, and influence on successors including Lassus and Palestrina and its striking, individual beauty.

The Marian Consort & Rose Consort of Viols, Rory McCleery

For its second Delphian recording, The Marian Consort have leafed through the beautifully calligraphed pages of the partbooks compiled in Oxford between 1581 and 1588 by the Elizabethan scholar Robert Dow, to present a deeply satisfying sequence of some of their brightest jewels. Sumptuous motets, melancholy consort songs and intricate, harmonically daring viol fantasies are seamlessly interwoven, all brought to life by seven voices and the robust plangency of the Rose Consort of Viols in the chapel of All Souls College, Oxford – where Dow himself was once a Fellow.

The Marian Consort is a young, dynamic early music vocal ensemble founded in Oxford in 2007. Combining academic insight with high levels of performance practice, the ensemble predominantly explores the repertoire of Renaissance and early Baroque music with its director Rory McCleery. They are joined by the Rose Consort of Viols, which takes its name from the celebrated family of viol makers, whose work spanned the development of the English consort repertoire.

The Marian Consort, directed by Rory McCleery

For their debut recording, the six-strong Marian Consort explores music from late 16th- and early 17th-century Spain. This fascinating programme celebrates the rich compositional fruits of the Siglo de Oro’s intensely competitive musical culture. These luminary works, all dedicated to the Virgin Mary, demand performances of great intelligence and vocal commitment. The youthful Marians respond absolutely, bringing hushed intimacy and bristling excitement to some of the most gorgeously searing lines in the history of European polyphony.