The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge resume their fruitful partnership with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment to present a rare performance of Handel’s Messiah in its entirety alongside soloists Mary Bevan, Hugh Cutting, James Way, and Jonathan Brown.
more about Choir of Clare College, Cambridge
Since the founding of a mixed-voice choir in 1972, The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge has gained an international reputation as one of the world’s leading university choirs. Former directors have included John Rutter and Timothy Brown, and under the direction of Graham Ross, Director of Music since 2010, it has been praised for its consistently ‘thrilling’ and ‘outstanding’ performances worldwide. The Choir is delighted to welcome back so many alumni to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the College’s founding.
more about The Orchestra of The Age of Enlightenment
The OAE was formed in 1986 by a group of musicians who took a good look at that curious institution we call the orchestra, and decided to start again from scratch. The Orchestra plays on instruments (or replicas) and use techniques from the time the music was written. This gets closer to the experience audiences would have had at the time the music was written. There are some quite radical differences between historic instruments and modern ones. The name refers to the common term for the explosion of science, philosophy and culture in Western Europe during the 1600s and 1700s, the Age of Enlightenment.
The OAE is an orchestra in residence at the Southbank Centre and Kings Place in London and Glyndebourne opera festival, and tours frequently around the UK and internationally. In 2020, the OAE became the very first orchestra in the UK to take up residence in a school through its embedded education partnership with Acland Burghley School in Camden.