About

An extraordinary evening of music and conversation in the magnificent setting of the Chapel of St Peter & St Paul. In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth and the 60th year of the Monteverdi Choir, this event offers a rare opportunity to explore the deep connections between two visionary composers, Bruckner and Carlo Gesualdo, separated by 250 years. 

Before the concert begins, esteemed music broadcaster, curator, and writer Sara Mohr-Pietsch will engage in an insightful conversation with the concert’s conductor, Jonathan Sells. Together, they will delve into two unlikely bedfellows, musical mavericks 250 years apart.  

About the evening
To hear his Bruckner’s choral music with fresh ears, the Monteverdi Choir have placed his celebrated a cappella motets together with unlikely bedfellows, above all the sacred motets of Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613). Richard Wagner was one of Bruckner’s musical heroes, and in his motets, Bruckner manages to distil a hyper-romantic and highly expressive idiom into a compact form which otherwise eluded both of them.  

250 years earlier, Gesualdo was experimenting with ear- and mind-bending chromatic expressionism and enharmonic shifts in a remarkably similar way. Both Bruckner and Gesualdo were outsiders, were strongly led by their Catholic faith, and showed signs of mental instability. The tormented passion of their music seems to reach out across the centuries.